


Choose Your Enemies Carefully

by PyrrhaIphis



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Dystopia, M/M, Minor Violence, The infamous foul mouth of Curt Wild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-11-30 05:21:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11456835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PyrrhaIphis/pseuds/PyrrhaIphis
Summary: As the 1984 election starts to swing into gear, President Reynolds is finally starting to be criticized for his administration's acts of censorship, and he brings in new foreign aides to help him deal with the situation.  When Arthur Stuart goes to cover the president's speech, he is so outraged by the speech made by one of those aides that he asks a question that just might be the biggest mistake of his life...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know if you spot any inappropriate Americanisms in the mouth (or POV) of any British characters so I can fix them! Thanks!
> 
> BTW, I was experimenting with a narrative style including parentheses when I wrote this...and looking over it as I posted it, I think I may have overdone it. The later chapters are not quite this clogged with them...but they're still present. (I have not repeated this experiment since, and I doubt I ever will.)

            The centre of the Reynolds campaign tent was the last place Arthur Stuart wanted to be on the day of the New York primaries.  But he’d drawn the short straw at the office, and had been forced into the assignment.  Given his own choice, he’d be where Mary was, in the Democratic camp, trying to interview John Glenn.  (The idea of even being in the same room with someone who really _had_ been up to the stars admittedly filled Arthur with a tingle of sadly delightful nostalgia for the days when he had idolized a man who pretended to be an alien.)

            In the days leading up to the New York primary election, President Reynolds had come increasingly under fire for the policies of his Committee for Cultural Renewal.  At first, the criticisms came entirely from the Democratic candidates’ campaign speeches.  Stopping the committee’s interference in matters of popular culture became the most popular—and commonplace—promise passing through the candidates’ lips.

            But the day before the primaries, the other Republican candidates joined that bandwagon.    That seemed to alert Reynolds to the committee’s growing unpopularity where nothing else had.  Every pundit in the country had spent months pointing out that Reynolds—as an allegedly popular incumbent—shouldn’t have even _had_ competition within his own party, but the Reynolds administration was notorious for ignoring the press.  (Aside from the occasional—but always furtive—squashing of a story.)  Still, it was sure to be illuminating, seeing how (or if) Reynolds addressed the issue today.

            Every campaign handled their candidate’s appearance at a primary slightly differently, but obviously when the candidate was already the President of the United States, things had to be a little different, a little more secure, and all the more so now that he was beginning to understand the deep undercurrent of discontent that was swirling around his feet.  Given the near martial law state the country had been permanently downgraded to after the first time someone took a pot-shot at Reynolds, Arthur could only hope that nothing violent would mar the rest of Reynolds’ time in office.  (Of course, he also hoped quite fervently that said time in office would promptly end mid-January, 1985.  If he’d been a religious man, he would have been praying for it daily for the last four years.  Sometimes he still did anyway.)

            The press box into which Arthur and his colleagues were corralled was small, and left no room for taking notes; no one could really raise their arms well enough to write.  (Every time the crowd jostled, Arthur worried that Curt’s pin would stab him straight through both tie and shirt.)  But there were dozens of television cameras trained on the stage where Reynolds was to appear, and Arthur had his little hand-held tape recorder at the ready.  Besides, he was confident in the power of his memory.  Nothing was likely to happen that he wouldn’t be able to remember long enough to write it down later.

            Reynolds arrived nearly five minutes late, to an unpleasantly off-key recording of “Hail to the Chief.”  He was accompanied by a number of suited aides, most of whom were very familiar faces from countless other press conferences.  A few of them were decidedly not Reynolds regulars, and yet also vaguely familiar, too.  The fact that he had a niggling sensation he had seen them before made Arthur’s skin prickle all over.  No one else in the press box seemed alarmed, however, so he tried to write it off as his imagination.

            After a few minutes of the same prepared speech he had given at the earlier primaries, Reynolds looked over at the new faces behind him, and then frowned back out at the audience.  “As you may know, my friends, some of my enemies have been spreading vicious lies about the great work I have undertaken with the Committee for Cultural Renewal.  Instead of appreciating my attempts to save our culture from the swirling vortex of depravity that has opened up beneath our feet like a ravenous Scylla, these fiends have criticised this great endeavour, and accused me of censorship!”

            The general audience let out noises of outrage at this ‘abuse,’ but most of the press box was fighting not to laugh.  (Arthur certainly was, anyway.)  If Reynolds didn’t know the difference between the tentacled Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, he was even more ignorant of ‘culture’ than anyone had previously realised.  (He had also mispronounced Scylla:  it came out ‘shill-uh’ instead of ‘skill-ah’.  That, perhaps, was a bit more forgivable.  He was, after all, only an American, and they would always be notorious for mispronouncing words.)

            “But I am here to tell you that we are not alone, my friends!” Reynolds announced, holding up both his hands above his head.  (All he needed was twin V signs and he’d be the picture of Richard Nixon.)  “My dear friends in the British government have heard about our troubles, and the Prime Minister herself has loaned me some aides to help keep the Committee for Cultural Renewal running strong in these days of stormy weather!”

            Bloody hell.  That’s where Arthur had seen those men before.  They were some of Thatcher’s cronies.  If they worked for the Iron Lady, then they were surely smarter and more subtle than anyone in Reynolds’ employ.  Also less likely to be insane, but Reynolds might be able to cure them of their sanity in short order…

            Reynolds soon handed over the microphone to one of his new foreign aides, a young man only a few years older than Arthur, and painfully familiar, though he couldn’t be quite sure from where.  (Might have been one of those arseholes who used to throw rotting fruit at the Flaming Creatures on their way into concert venues…)  “On my flight to New York, I had quite the chat with a bit of a posh on her way home from her holidays on the continent,” the man said into the microphone.  He had the studied ‘perfect’ London accent that Americans expected of everyone in England; either he was quite the posh himself, or he’d spent years practicing at mimicking BBC announcers.  (Arthur used to try that himself, to defeat the Manchester accent that the London birds thought was vulgar, but it had been too stubborn for him, and he had soon enough accepted that he couldn’t change it.)  “When I told her why I was coming to this land of yours, she asked me why I would want to take such a job,” the man continued.  “She thought the committee was interfering with the basic right to freedom of speech.  Which, I might add, we hold just as sacred as you do.”

            For some reason, that made the audience chuckle.  (Arthur didn’t even want to know why.)

            “Allow me to share with you the story I told her,” the Thatcherite on the stage continued.  “One of my colleagues used to have a brother.  A few years younger than he or I.  One of those boys with pretty, girly faces—the sort of boy who had to watch himself whenever he went to the cinema, lest some perverted old man make advances on him in the darkness.”  The audience laughed, but Arthur’s heart froze up.  (Had he ever told anyone about that man?  He…he hadn’t, had he?  Had he…had he been fool enough to mention in the hearing of his brother, of all people…?)  “He was a confused child, easily misled, and his family had to watch him like a hawk to keep him from falling under bad influences.  But eventually their guard slipped.  A bad influence as big as the moon loomed over Britain, and the poor boy was pulled under by the resulting tidal wave.  Fell under glam rock’s spell of glitter and sodomy.  I won’t tell you what my colleague’s father found that benighted boy doing, but I will say it was the last time any of his family saw him alive.  Ran off to London, where he died in poverty, having sold his body and his soul for the twin evils of rock and drugs.”  Arthur couldn’t help releasing a deep breath that came out a bit like a sigh at the news that the young man under discussion was dead.  (The colleague _wasn’t_ Arthur’s brother!  Despite that he didn’t really believe in God, he couldn’t help thanking God all the same.)  The young man on the stage slammed his fist into the podium.  “That’s why I and my colleagues want to help President Reynolds achieve the impossible and tame forever the demon that has arisen in modern society!  Free speech needn’t encourage sin, death and destruction.  That’s all the committee wants to do, is to protect innocents like my colleague’s poor brother—to save them before it’s too late!”

            The crowd erupted in cheers, but the press box was foaming with shouted questions.  At first, Arthur was too numbed by what he had heard to be able to form words.  But when he saw that the fellow on the stage was indeed answering questions, he found his speech soon enough, and joined in the clamour.

            “Oh, do I hear one of my own countrymen among you?” the fellow laughed.  “This should be amusing!  Let me hear his question.”

            “In your story,” Arthur said, fighting to keep his voice level, “you were layin’ all the blame for the tragedy on glam rock.”

            “A Manchester boy?  How quaint,” the Thatcherite chuckled.  “I wonder if you knew my colleague or his brother?”

            “Manchester’s a very large city,” Arthur replied coldly.  (All the while telling his stomach not to throw up.  This was not the time to give in to terror.  He could throw up all he wanted after the press conference was over.)  “If I may continue my question?”

            “Of course.”

            “Like I said, you were blamin’ glam rock for everything that happened to that fellow, but how can you justify workin’ with the Committee for Cultural Renewal if you’re so opposed to glam?”

            “I don’t follow you.”  The man’s confusion sounded genuine.  (But Reynolds and a few of his cronies looked like they were sweating!)

            “Well, he may not be goin’ by the name of Brian Slade anymore, but…the man’s practically the committee’s public face,” Arthur informed him, with a cold smile.  _There_!  Let them just _try_ to silence all those television cameras!  Just _try_!

            Murmurs of confusion ran up and down through the crowd and the press box both.  Reynolds took over the microphone, and quickly changed the subject.  All during his speech, the other reporters were whispering questions to Arthur.  (Could he prove that allegation?  Did he have any sources?  Would he share them?  Why hadn’t he gone to print with it already?)

            When the press conference was finally over, Arthur was eager to get back to the office and write up his report, but he wasn’t permitted to go more than a hundred feet before he was surrounded by large, ominous men.  They claimed to be Secret Service Agents, and dragged him into a black car before Arthur could even demand to see proof they were who they said, and the car had taken off before he could try to get out.  He felt lost by the time the car stopped, deep in an underground car park.

            His escorts informed him that they had brought him to the Committee for Cultural Renewal’s New York headquarters, and that someone wanted to talk to him.  An idle (idol) part of his brain half-fantasized that Tommy Stone would be waiting for him, torn between fury at being discovered and flattery that someone still held affection for Brian Slade.

            The reality was infinitely worse.

            Arthur was led into an interrogation room (just like in the movies) and left alone at a little wooden table, with nothing to distract him from his dishevelled reflection in the one-way mirror.  Until the door opened, and another suited man entered the room.

            Like the Thatcherite on the stage, he was a few years older than Arthur.

            But this time, the face above the perfectly pressed suit was painfully, _instantly_ recognizable.

            “Nigel…”  Literally the last person—second to last—person Arthur had ever wanted to see again.

            His brother sighed deeply, and sat down opposite Arthur.  “She told us the troublemaker was from Manchester, but…”  Nigel shook his head.  “You’re supposed to be dead.”

            For a minute or two, Arthur wasn’t even sure how to respond.  “But…I’ve been sendin’ Mum cards for her birthday and Christmas for the last ten years…”

            “Yes, and it’s become increasingly difficult keeping them from her.”

            (Somehow, the notion that his father had been reading his mother’s mail had never occurred to Arthur as the reason that his mum had never written him back.)  “I still don’t see why you’d think I was dead.”

            Nigel consulted his watch (looked like a gold Rolex), as if Arthur’s death was overdue by mere minutes.  “Shouldn’t you have died of AIDS ages ago?”

            “No one I’ve dated ‘as ever even shown symptoms,” Arthur insisted.  (Though he daily dreaded finding an airmail letter in the post and learning that one of the Creatures had started displaying those symptoms.)

            “You have no idea how difficult it is to climb through the ranks with the dread of someone discovering I’ve got a bleeding fairy for a brother,” Nigel told him, glaring all the while.

            “I’d think you’d be more worried about them discoverin’ you barely kept from failin’ school every term.  When did you become so bloody ambitious?”

            “This is the age of ambition.  If you weren’t such a freak, you’d know that.”  Nigel let out a grim chuckle.  His old teenage cruelty suddenly seemed like loving affection.  A hand rapped on the one-way mirror, getting Nigel’s attention, but he quickly turned back to look at Arthur.  “Who have you told?” he asked.  Arthur couldn’t help but marvel at how little of his Manchester accent was carried in his words; it was barely even a trace.  “How many other people know the truth about Brian Slade?”

            Arthur could only laugh.  “If any of those cameras were goin’ live, I’d think half the state of New York knows by now.”

            “Then you haven’t told anyone.  Not left behind any notebooks filled with evidence.”

            Every nerve in Arthur’s body was screaming out to lie and claim he had left scores of notebooks, each filled to the brim with proof that Brian Slade had become Tommy Stone.  To claim that he’d mailed those notebooks to every major newspaper and magazine in the world, and that they’d all be printed simultaneously if anything happened to him.

            But he couldn’t do it.  He couldn’t even meet his brother’s disgusted gaze.

            Nigel let out a grim chuckle.  “Tell Miss Hazelbourne her employer’s secret is safe,” he said loudly.  “No need to worry about this spineless ponce.”

            “You bloody arsehole!”  Arthur started to his feet, enraged.

            Nigel just sat there calmly, laughing at him.  Then, slowly, he stood, and walked over to the door out of the interrogation room.  The door was opened for him by one of the burly, suited men who had ‘escorted’ Arthur in there in the first place.  “What do you want done with him, Mr. Stuart?” the suited man asked.

            “Disappear him.”

            “You bastard!”  With a speed he was rarely able to use, Arthur leapt across the room and grabbed his brother’s arm, yanking him back inside as he was trying to leave.  “You can’t—you can’t just order your own brother’s death!”

            “Why not?”  Nigel’s face was contorted by a callous smirk.  “After all, you’ve been dead for years.”

            “Would you really be able to look Mum in the face, knowin’ I was dead at your command?”

            Nigel laughed.  “I had no problem looking her in the face and telling her I’d seen your contorted, abused corpse.  Why would this change anything?”

            “Corpse?  What—what are you talkin’ about?!”

            “Mum caught sight of you on one of the news reports, you know.  After that freakish fag you left us for got himself shot on stage.  Nearly went down to London to look for you, but Father talked her out of it.  Convinced her she needed her rest.  So he and I went in her place.”  Nigel laughed.  “He spent the whole time parked in some pub or other, drinking himself stupid.”

            “You mean _more_ stupid,” Arthur laughed grimly.  “But you didn’t try very hard to find me.  I wasn’t exactly hidin’; everyone knew I was sleepin’ with a whole rock band.”

            “I didn’t try at all.  Spent a week having fun, then we went home and I told Mum all about finding your tortured remains in the city morgue, one of thousands of fairies who’d purposely taken lethal overdoses to mourn their king’s death.”

            “Mum actually _believed_ that?  When the bloody hell did I _ever_ act suicidal?!  And killin’ myself over someone who wasn’t even really dead?!”

            “When that story broke, it just made your death that much more tragic,” Nigel laughed.  “Nearly killed Mum, actually.  I might have chosen a less dramatic death for you if I’d known he’d only been faking it.”  He shrugged.  “At least that guaranteed she’d turn off the telly right fast any time a story came on about anything involving rock musicians.  Less chance she might see you in another crowd shot.”  He pushed Arthur’s hand off his arm.  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m anxious to get back to work.  You’d do better to relax.  Try and enjoy your last minutes on this planet.”

            For a moment, Arthur’s mind was flooded with the image of his mother crying hysterically over his alleged death ten years ago, followed by the horror that she’d never know he had really died, or of his brother’s involvement in his actual death.  The images were replaced with a thick, overpowering _red_ , as if his eyes were being flooded with blood.

            Arthur had never been a violent man.

            He had never before struck another human being.

            But now he couldn’t restrain his fists.  His hate.

            He began pummelling Nigel with both hands.  When he ran away from home ten years ago, Arthur had already been an inch taller than Nigel.  Since then, he had grown at least another inch, and while he hadn’t exactly become a bodybuilder, he had put on a _few_ pounds of muscle, while Nigel evidently hadn’t gained an ounce of it in all that time.

            Though Arthur wasn’t terribly strong, his rage gave him ten times his normal strength.

            It took three of those suited men to pull him off his brother.

            As Nigel attempted to right his torn and bloody suit, one of his eyes was already shut by a swelling eyelid, and his lips were cut and bleeding.

            “Make him suffer before you finish it,” Nigel growled, before limping out of the room and slamming the door behind him.


	2. Chapter 2

            It had been one of those days where he couldn’t concentrate on anything.  He’d open a beer and then forget it was there, opening another instead.  Nearly burned down his sofa by forgetting he’d already lit a cigarette.

            Curt Wild didn’t consider himself to be a superstitious man, but he knew a bad omen when he saw one.

            Ten years ago in Berlin, he had woken up one morning unable to concentrate, his hands shaking so badly that he’d come close to cutting his fingers on his guitar strings.  Nearly walked out into traffic twice, and almost got arrested until some fan on the street recognized him and translated for the German cop.

            Late that night, he learned that Brian had been shot on stage.

            Well, that he had _seemed_ to be shot on stage.  Not that even Jack had known it was faked yet.  Curt hadn’t learned that until nearly a week later, when he’d sobered up enough to call Mandy.

            That wasn’t the only time he’d had shit like that happen, but it was certainly the most dramatic.  The only one that had nearly ended Curt’s life both before and after the event his nerves were presaging came to pass.

            When he heard someone pounding on his door, Curt actually found himself _hoping_ he was just behind on his rent payment.  Or maybe this time it would secretly be good.  Maybe this time the bullets had been real…

            He opened the door and found himself being confronted by a half dozen television cameras, all jockeying for position in the dingy hallway, trying to get a view of him past the other reporters.  Everyone was shouting at him at once.

            “What the fuck is going on?” Curt demanded.  He was much too sober to have to deal with this kind of shit.

            They all started shouting at once.  (Is it true?  How long have you known?  _Did_ you know?  Do you ever see him?  Are you still having sex with him?  Are you still gay?  Is _he_ still gay?)  “Shut the fuck up!”  It wasn’t actually Curt who bellowed at them.  It was the old woman across the hall.  She slammed the door again as soon as she’d finished shouting at them.

            Curt thought about slamming his door, too, but he had to know what they were doing here.  After the morning he’d had…he had to know what had happened.  “One at time,” he told them.  “Tell me what’s going on, and then maybe I’ll be able to answer your questions.”

            “Is it true that Brian Slade is now Tommy Stone?” one of them asked, shoving a microphone in his face.

            That face suddenly felt cold and exposed.  What had happened?  Why did they all know that?  Who…who told them?  “What’s going on?” Curt asked.  (He might have had a cold sweat going.)

            “You didn’t hear about what happened at the primaries?” one of the other reporters asked.

            “I got bullied out of my vote years ago,” Curt pointed out coldly.  Not that the press knew that.  They thought he really had been caught with drugs, that he had deserved his time in federal prison.  “So what the fuck happened at the primaries?”

            The reporters exchanged uncomfortable glances.  “Got a VCR?” one of them asked.  “We had two cameras running.  I’ve got the secondary tape on me.”

            Curt nodded, and let the horde of motherfuckers into his crummy little apartment.  Let them see what had happened to him.  He used to be the toast of the whole goddamned world, sleeping on silk sheets (in the arms of a silky lover) and drinking champagne for breakfast.  Between one scam and another (some legal, some not), Reynolds and his crew had diddled Curt out of almost every cent he’d ever made.  Even though his records still sold, he was living in a rundown little shithole; gold records hanging on grimy walls that hadn’t seen fresh wallpaper since the Great Depression.

            The reporter with the spare tape put it into Curt’s VCR (a cheap model to go with the cheap TV) and soon raw footage of President Reynolds addressing a crowd of his rabid followers appeared on Curt’s TV.  It was the first time in that television’s life that Curt hadn’t instantly changed the channel on seeing footage like that.  Reynolds handed over the microphone to some British suit, who told an unpleasantly stilted story about the dangers of rock and roll.  Minus the out-of-nowhere death scene at the end, it could have been the story of almost every rock fan (and singer) in the world.  In the confusion afterwards, one of the reporters in the press box started asking a question about that story.

            Curt almost missed the point of the question (the blunt telling of the whole world that Brian Slade had become the puppet of the Committee for Cultural Renewal) because he had to support himself on a wall as soon as he heard that voice (saw that face!) on the tape.

            “What happened to him?” Curt asked, after the tape was stopped again.

            “That’s what we want to know,” one of the reporters replied.  “How did Brian Slade become—”

            “No, you stupid motherfucker!” Curt shouted, grabbing the reporter by the front of his shirt.  “What happened to _him_?!” he pointed at the television with his free hand.  “The man who asked that question!”

            The reporters all looked at each other blankly.  “Well…he…uh…left?” one suggested uncomfortably.

            “They’re not gonna let him just get away with spilling that secret.  They sent me to fucking _jail_ to protect it!  We’ve gotta find him before they do!”

            “But…he’s a print man,” another reporter pointed out.  “We don’t really associate with them much.”

            “Anyone know what paper he works for?” the one female reporter asked.  “We could try calling their office and see if they know where he is.”

            “He works for the _Herald_ ,” Curt told them.  (He wasn’t even aware of the way his hand had snaked into his back pocket and started clutching his wallet.)

            The girl reporter was soon talking into his phone.  “I was wondering if I could talk to one of your reporters,” she said.  “His name is, uh—”

            “Arthur Stuart.”

            “—Arthur Stuart.”  The girl paused, listening, then frowned.  “I see.  No idea where they went?  Okay, thanks anyway.”  She hung up the phone, and turned to look at Curt.  “One of his coworkers saw him getting into a car with a bunch of suited gorillas.”

            Curt could feel his lungs closing in on themselves, and his throat trying to claw its way down into his stomach.  He often insisted that was what his near-fatal overdose had felt like, but the doctors all swore that he wouldn’t have been able to feel or remember that, and that it wouldn’t have felt like that even if he _could_ remember it.  “I’ve gotta go after him.”

            “But if we don’t know where they are…” one of the men squeaked.

            “I know where they are.”  Those goons wouldn’t have taken him anywhere but their secret base.  (Not many had seen those rooms and lived to tell the tale.  Curt didn’t know how lucky he really was.)

            “Do you really think you can save him?” the tallest of the reporters asked.  Big as a linebacker, and with about as much spine as a fucking earthworm.  “You seem to be implying that there’s some kind of conspiracy going on, and if that conspiracy was able to manipulate the justice system to—”

            “They won’t do shit if they know they’re gonna get caught for it,” Curt interrupted.  “If you’re broadcasting live, they’ll have to let us in.”

            “We can’t do that,” one of the other men objected.

            “Ugh, am I the only one in this room with both a camera _and_ balls?” the female reporter asked.  (When did girls get issued with balls?  Had Curt missed something?  She _was_ a chick, right?  She had breasts and everything…)  “We’re just local access, but that means I can go live whenever I want.”

            “Then let’s go.”  Curt stuffed his feet into some boots, and grabbed his keys off the counter.

            “On one condition,” the reporter said, giving him a cold smile.  “You give me an exclusive on this whole Brian Slade/Tommy Stone story.”

            “Fine.  _After_.”

            “On the way,” the girl countered, with a warmer smile.  “At this time of day, it’ll take a while for our van to get wherever we’re going.”

            “Yeah, all right,” Curt sighed.  “But we gotta go _now_!”  He started shoving the reporters back towards the front door.

            “Wait, what about the rest of us?  We get _nothing_?” one of them objected.

            “Feel free to follow us in your own vans,” the girl reporter laughed.

            “Yeah, do,” Curt agreed.  “More cameras rolling means more chances they won’t panic and open fire on us.”

            “Open fire?” one of the men repeated.  “Who the hell are we going after, the mob?”

            “The mob would never be this sloppy,” Curt chuckled.

            The other reporters kept yammering questions the whole time they were vacating his apartment, and heading down to the front of the building, where the whole sidewalk was thick with news vans, most of them double parked.  The girl reporter led Curt inside one of the vans, making the teenage boy in the front seat let out a yelp of surprise.

            “Nell?!  You’re early!  Wait, who’s that guy?”

            The girl reporter sighed.  “This is our story,” she said, gesturing to Curt.  “Anyway, I’m gonna be interviewing him while we’re on the way to—oh, where are we going?”

            “New York headquarters of the Committee for Cultural Renewal,” Curt told her, sitting down on one of the few surfaces in the back of the van that wasn’t covered in wires.

            The teenage boy in the front swore in Spanish.  “You…you are sure about that, aren’t you?” Nell asked, with a tentative smile.

            “Yeah, I’m fucking sure.  What happened to those balls?”

            Nell laughed uncomfortably as the boy up front started laughing his ass off.  “All right, enough of that, Luis.  Just drive.”

            “Fine, but if you get me or my madre shipped back to Santo Domingo, you’ll meet my abuela’s fukú before you can blink,” the boy said, shaking his head.

            Nell grimaced, took a seat, and pointed her camera at Curt.  “We won’t roll live on this stuff, just once we get there.  How long have we got to talk?”

            “In this traffic?” the boy returned.  “At least ten minutes.  Hey, should those other vans be following us?”

            “What, don’t tell me those fuckers chickened out!” Curt exclaimed.

            “Oh, we’re sharing the story with them?”  Luis sounded disappointed.

            “Safety in numbers, mi hijo,” Nell laughed.

            “You ain’t my madre,” Luis snapped.  “Don’t try talkin’ cozy to me, whitegirl!”

            Nell sighed.  “Right, so ignoring the Caribbean faction in the front seat, let’s get on with this exclusive interview.”

            Curt grimaced.  “Can’t it come _after_ we’ve saved Arthur?  I’m not really gonna be able to concentrate until this is over with.”

            “Who is he?  Your boyfriend?”

            Curt cleared his throat, uncomfortably aware that he could see the little blinking red light that indicated the camera was rolling.  (He was _not_ blushing.  No way.  He didn’t blush.  Not even capable of it.)  “It’s a long story.”

            “I’m sure that won’t make it less interesting.”

            Bitch was not gonna let go…  “I’m not sure where to start,” Curt sighed.  “It’s kind of tied up in everything else.”

            “If he’s gonna start talking gay bondage shit, I’m pulling this van over right now!” Luis shouted from the front seat.

            “Arthur’s too fragile for bondage,” Curt insisted.  “But if _you_ ’d like to try it, you look tough enough to take it.  I’d be gentle,” he promised, fighting not to laugh so hard he’d piss himself.

            The boy shrieked in terror, and stamped his foot on the brakes.

            “It was a joke, you idiot!” Nell shouted at him.  “Just drive, you little moron!  But if you could refrain from teasing my driver, I’d appreciate it, Mr. Wild.”

            “Couldn’t help myself; the opening was just too inviting.”  His choice of words elicited another noise of terror from the front seat.  “I forget sometimes how scared straight guys are of admitting that men are sexy, too.”

            “Terror is the one constant of the straight man’s existence,” Nell agreed.  “That’s why I’m so glad to be a woman.”  She chuckled.  “So, let’s hear the story about this guy we’re off to rescue.  Are you the one who told him that Tommy Stone was really Brian Slade?”

            “No, I didn’t tell him.”  Curt shrugged.  “He’d probably seen pictures of Brian with Shannon back in the day.  Arthur was a big fan ten years ago.”

            “Shannon?”

            “Shannon Hazelbourne.  Tommy Stone’s manager.  She started out as Brian’s wardrobe mistress, and by the end she was practically attached to his hip, following him everywhere he went.  Everywhere except my bed,” Curt added with a laugh.  Thank God she didn’t want to follow Brian _there_!  Curt wouldn’t have been able to stand that.  (Not with Shannon.  Mandy, sure, but not Shannon.)

            “So this Arthur fellow, did you meet him ten years ago, while you were touring with Brian Slade?”

            Curt smiled sadly, and shook his head.  “No, our paths didn’t cross quite that early.  He only ran away from his oppressive family home about the same time Brian and I broke up.  Not that he knew that was going on.  It was almost six months later.  There was this concert Jack Fairy and I were putting on with a bunch of other acts.  Called it the Death of Glitter, ‘cause we were finally admitting that Brian hadn’t just killed his own career, but all of glam rock.”

            “And he was in the audience?”

            “Yeah.  God, he was so beautiful…”  Curt shut his eyes, calling up the whole scene, lush and vibrant in his memory.  Eager and yet slightly fearful, the boy made his way across the roof towards him…

            “So you, um, had a…fling?” Nell prompted, her voice trembling slightly.  (Curt wasn’t getting a hard-on, was he?  That would be fucking embarrassing…)

            “Yeah.”  Curt got his wallet out of his pocket, and pulled out the battered old Polaroid.  The white edging had been all but obliterated, and the pigment was fading.  Arthur’s shirt didn’t look terribly purple anymore, but his beauty was undiminished.  The annoyed look on Curt’s face was the worst part of the picture, and it hadn’t faded, either.  “Look at this.”

            Curt held out the photo towards her, and Nell trained the camera on it.  “That’s him?” she asked.

            “A bunch of girls were hanging out in front of the venue when we left the next morning.  Took that photo before I could see they had cameras.”  Curt sighed.  “I wanted to tear it up, but Arthur convinced me not to.  He even talked me into letting those girls take a few more pictures for themselves.  But he insisted that I should keep this one.”

            “Why?”  Nell turned the camera back up to Curt’s face.

            He looked back down at the photo sadly.  “He must have known.”

            “Known what?”

            “That I wasn’t really gonna call.”  Curt sighed, putting the photo back in his wallet.  “I’d promised him I’d call him—that I’d take him with me when I left town.  I meant it when I said it, but…the more I thought about it, the more I talked about it with Jack and the band…the stupider it seemed.”

            “He looks very young in the photo.  Was he even at the age of consent?”

            Curt laughed.  “Not in England, he wasn’t!  I’m not sure how old he was, exactly; might have been legal in America, but England’s fucked up.  You know what the age of consent is there?”

            “No idea,” Nell admitted.

            “It’s a sliding scale.  Sixteen for straight sex, but twenty-one for gay sex.  So it’s totally legal for a fifty year old man to fuck a sixteen year old girl, but if a twenty-two year old man fucks a nineteen year old boy, he could end up in jail.”

            “Were you really only twenty-two in that photo?” Nell asked, her eyebrows cocked.

            “I was making a point,” Curt sighed.  “But you gotta agree that that’s fucked up, right?”

            “Anything that lets a fifty year old man have his way with a sixteen year old girl is demented,” Nell agreed.  “But if we could get back to the story?”

            Curt nodded, replacing his wallet in his back pocket.  “I’ll be honest:  I had just about forgotten Arthur even existed.  A lot of shit happened in those ten years.  Including that the former love of my life turned over and became a conservative sycophant.”  He grimaced, shaking his head.  “That really fucked me up.  I knew him right away, you know?  Mandy, too.  When someone breaks your heart that bad, you always know them, no matter what they do to themselves.  Mandy went to see him, and got talked into keeping quiet, I guess.  But when I…I had to get shitfaced before I could even talk to him.  I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, though.  I thought there had to be a _reason_ he’d tried to invent a new self, a new career.  But there wasn’t.  He just didn’t like the baggage that came with the name Brian Slade.  Even though he’d picked out every piece of it himself.”

            Curt paused, looking around, hoping for a drink, but there wasn’t so much as a bottle of water in the whole van.  Probably because of all that electrical equipment.  He let out a deep, disappointed sigh before continuing.  “You know, I never liked the baggage, either.  Everywhere I went, every time I went on tour, the first thing that preceded my arrival was some goddamn article in the paper with that fucking ubiquitous photo of me kissing Brian—or that stupid stunt we used to pull on stage when he was off his head on cocaine.”  (There was something ironically amusing about ‘being off his head’ causing someone to fake _giving_ head on stage.)  “I never liked knowing there were parents’ associations gunning for me even before I got into town, because they thought my music was gonna encourage their sons to start sucking each other off, or whatever else they accused me of.  But I never ran and hid from it.  I never tried to escape it by pretending I wasn’t me, that I was someone else.  I did all that shit, and I’m not ashamed of any of it, so why should I try to hide it?”

            “Was that really the only reason Brian Slade created a new identity?  To get away from his old reputation?” Nell asked.

            “It’s the only excuse he gave,” Curt told her, “but maybe there was more going on.”  He shrugged.  “Thing is, I wasn’t gonna let him get away with it.  And I made the mistake of telling him so.  Scheduled a press conference the next morning to tell the world about it.  But I never got to hold that conference.  My manager—then-manager—ended up using that time to tell the world that I’d been arrested for possession of illegal narcotics.  Motherfucker knew I was clean, mind you!  He just didn’t have the balls to stand up for me.  My trial was a joke, too.  They got to my defense lawyer, prevented him from actually defending me.  All because Reynolds had decided he wanted Tommy Stone to be the clean, pure face of the type of pop music he could approve of.”  Curt sighed sadly, shaking his head.  “I wasn’t actually in that long—they just wanted to ruin my credibility, not to mention my career—but everything had changed by the time I got out.  Mandy had gone from persuaded into tentative silence to scared shitless.  And I guess I got pretty scared, too.  When people came looking for Brian, I answered by instinct that I didn’t know where the fuck he was, and didn’t want to.”  A sad kind of chuckle.  “Actually, I guess my favorite answer was to say that’s he’s been dead to me ever since 1974.  Not lying, but not saying anything those committee fuckers could get on my case for.”

            “But that seems to have changed now,” Nell pointed out.

            “Yeah.  Normally, when someone came looking for Brian—some reporter doing a ‘where is he now’ story—those apes would watch quietly from the sidelines, making sure Mandy and I don’t say shit.  Normally, they never interfered.  I don’t know what was different this time.  Did they just think that if I saw a guy as pretty as Arthur that I’d do and say anything for a chance to score with him?  Did they realize we’d met before?”  Curt shook his head.  “There’s all those other Polaroids out there, you know?  I don’t know who those girls were, or what they did with those pictures.  One of them might have ended up in the committee’s hands, so maybe they _did_ know Arthur and I had a past.  All I know for sure is that this time they took me to a run-down old office in a bad part of town, and made me wait there until Arthur called, then gave me this script to read out to tell him that I wasn’t willing to talk to him about Brian.  The irony of that is that I didn’t recognize his name.”  Curt laughed sadly.  “If they’d just let him call me at my home, I wouldn’t have known who he was, I wouldn’t have said a thing, and…well, I guess it wouldn’t have changed much, in the long run.”

            “Did something else happen?”

            Curt nodded.  “I always get sent tickets to every Tommy Stone show in town here.”  (Curt was convinced that Brian was sending them personally, some part of him still in love, still wanting them to get back together, despite Reynolds, despite the committee, despite Shannon and her jealously possessive obsession.)  “Normally, I just throw them out.  Well, maybe half the time I throw them out.  Anyway, I went to this last one—the one just days before the tenth anniversary of the day Brian almost killed me by pretending to get killed himself.”  Curt sighed.  “It was shit, same as the last one I’d been to.  What made Brian’s music so entrancing was the very act of rebellion tied up into every particle of it, from the songs and the performers right down to the lighting.  Take away that rebellion and replace it with compliance, and there’s nothing left.  I don’t know why I tortured myself like that, but somehow it felt more important than usual.”  Curt couldn’t help smiling.  “After the show, I went to a nearby bar to get drunk, because I really needed be drunk right then.  And I was just sitting there, keeping to myself, when Arthur walked up and started talking to me.”  Curt shut his eyes again, remembering the sight of Arthur standing near his table, stammering and awkward and still beautiful.  “I didn’t recognize him at first,” Curt admitted.  “He, uh, dresses kinda different these days.”

            “I’d think so,” Nell agreed, with a soft chuckle.  “What did you talk about?”

            “Brian, of course.”  Curt sighed, opening his eyes again.  “Honestly, we talked about Brian a lot that night ten years ago, too.  Everyone talked to me about Brian back then.  They thought I was obsessed—or maybe I was, I don’t know.  How do you know if it’s you or them in a situation like that?”  Curt shook his head.  “I had a feeling we were probably still being watched, so even after I remembered him, I couldn’t tell him so.  I did what I could to make him realize I remembered him, but…what was the point of it?  As long as he was a reporter, I wasn’t gonna be able to get near him without being watched.  And I don’t think they would have backed off if I’d told them I was looking to get laid, not spill any secrets.”

            “No, probably not,” Nell agreed.  “Is that when you started carrying that photo with you?”

            “Yeah.  After I got home that night, I dug through all my old shit until I found it.  Maybe there wasn’t any point to it.  I just…I don’t know.  Maybe I needed to see it to be sure I was right about who he was.”  (Since Curt had given him Brian’s pin, it _was_ important to be sure that Arthur really was the same beautiful boy from the Death of Glitter concert.)

            “At the time, did you plan to see him again?”

            “I wanted to.”  There wasn’t much else he could do other than _want_.

            “But you weren’t going to do anything about it?” Nell asked, sounding surprised.

            “What _could_ I have done?  You have no idea what it’s like to live your whole life under constant surveillance.  They’ve probably even bugged my fucking apartment.”  Curt sighed, shutting his eyes.  “I guess if I’d run into him again, I’d have found an excuse to take out my wallet and drop it in front of him, so it’d fall open to that picture.  Maybe slipped him a note to explain why I wasn’t free to say or do anything.”

            “You were just going to live with that?  Forever?”

            Curt laughed grimly, and shook his head.  “Even if he wins this election, Reynolds will still be out of office in ’89.  That’s…well, it’s actually a pretty long time, but until now I never had any reason to care.  My life was shit anyway.”

            “That’s—”

            “We’re here,” Luis announced, as the van pulled over to the curb.

            Curt didn’t want for the boy to finish parking.  With these guys, every minute (every second!) counted hours.  The lobby of the building was filled with the usual mix of low-grade pencil pushers and rent-a-cops.  The pencil pushers all jumped in terror at his arrival (jumpier than usual) and the rent-a-cops started talking into walkie-talkies and casually opening the snaps holding their guns in their holsters.

            But then Nell came in with her camera.  The pencil pushers starting making for the exits, and the rent-a-cops immediately moved their hands away from their guns.  Curt couldn’t help grinning as he made his way towards the elevator.  TV vultures had their uses after all…

            One nervy rent-a-cop tried to stop Curt, about the same time as several more TV guys piled into the lobby.  “If you’re not cleared to be here, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

            “She’s my clearance,” Curt said, gesturing at Nell.

            “We’re broadcasting live,” Nell told the rent-a-cop, “and I’m sure our viewers will want to know:  are you knowingly covering up criminal acts, or are you merely an innocent dupe?”

            “Criminal acts?!” the rent-a-cop repeated, his voice shaking.  “This is a government facility!”  While the guard was distracted, Curt pressed the button to call the elevator.

            “That means you could be protecting traitors in the midst of committing an act of war by torturing and/or killing an innocent British citizen,” one of the other reporters interjected, in a pretty convincing English accent.  Not perfect, but more than enough to fool the average American.  As someone who had spent two years living in England (with an Englishman), Curt was far from average.

            “No, but…” the rent-a-cop objected, his face breaking out in red blotches and a serious flop-sweat.  “This is a secure government facility,” he repeated.

            “And if they didn’t have something to hide, they’d have military personnel guarding it, instead of regular hired guards,” another reporter pointed out.  “It should be obvious to you that something is suspicious here.  If you let us in, then you become the hero who helped put an end to this reign of terror.”

            When the elevator arrived, the reporters were still trying to coax the guard into seeing it their way.  Nell was the only one who followed Curt into the elevator.  Not that it mattered to him; he’d have gone on alone if he’d had to.  She tried to draw him out into conversation about the building (How did he know where he was going?  When was he before?  Why?  What had happened?) but Curt wasn’t in a mood to talk.  He was impatient for the elevator to get where it was going.

            It had been years since he’d been there, but the memory burned strong in his veins.  He knew how to reach that interrogation room.  (He was positive Brian had been on the other side of that mirror, watching him take that beating.  But no matter how many times Curt had called out to him, Brian had done nothing to put a stop to it.)

            The sight visible through the one-way mirror was enough to make Curt’s heart stop, and his blood run backwards.

            The table and chairs were all upended.

            There were splatters of blood here and there on the walls, particularly near the door.

            Arthur was kneeling in the corner, his face towards the walls and his hands on the back of his head.

            One of those motherfuckers in the suits was standing behind him, gun in hand.

            “They’re gonna fucking _execute_ him!?” Curt shouted, his breath only able to leave his body in a rush of anger and words.

            (“You have no clearance to be here!” the suited man in the room with them was shouting at the same time.  “If you aren’t out in five seconds, you’re under arrest!”)

            Curt grabbed a chair and started using it to break the window.  He’d never be able to get past that gorilla to the door!  The glass barely even cracked with the first impact, but it made the man in the interrogation room shake, the gun in his hand leaping visibly.

            (“We’re live to the world!” Nell was shouting.  “Everything you say or do is being transmitted to everyone in New York City!”)

            Curt hit the window again.  And again.

            He hadn’t been in London on February 5th, 1974.

            He hadn’t been able to save Brian (from himself).

            If he could at least save Arthur…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the driver; when I wrote this, I was reading "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", and I'm easily influenced. :P


	3. Chapter 3

            It wasn’t the first beating Arthur had taken.  To some straight men, ‘fag-beating’ was a particularly delightful (and harmless) sport.  It was less common before Brian betrayed his fans, but it had become increasingly common ever since.

            The last one had been so bad it had nearly prevented Arthur from entering America:  both eyes blackened, his lips swollen and cut, and his nose plastered over from being broken.  The Customs officials had seen no resemblance between his face and the one on his passport.

            Since moving to New York, Arthur had been more careful.  The American predilection for violence was legendary, after all.  He had been tried to ensure that everyone thought he was no different than they were (apart from his insuperable accent).  Maybe he’d even succeeded.

            No amount of careful deception could ever have protected him from his brother’s treachery.  There wasn’t any point in trying to fight back.  The man pummelling him had fists the size of grotesquely overweight hams.  All Arthur could do was try to avoid the worst of the blows, slipping to the side when he could, ducking a bit here or there.

            But he was still in a bad way when the door opened and another man rushed into the room.  The first man released Arthur’s shirt, letting him tumble back into his chair, where he was further assaulted by the sight of his reflection.  One eye was swollen shut already—and the other like to follow soon—and blood was trickling down across his face from a cut atop his head.  There was a hole in his lower lip where a blow had made him bite right through it, and a burst of blood on his chest where Curt’s pin had punched its way through shirt and skin.

            The second man spent some time whispering something into the first man’s ear, then handed him a gun (despite that he had a gun of his own in a shoulder holster that was very visible from where Arthur was sitting) and left the room again.

            The man who had spent the last half an hour beating Arthur ragged walked over to the table, and set the new gun down on it, handle towards Arthur.

            “What…?” was the only word Arthur could form to express his terror at the sight.  He wasn’t stupid!  He knew there was only one intended outcome to his being given a gun.

            “Seems there’s some disagreement among the brass,” the man explained, with a smile that would not have been out of place on the face of a Bond villain’s henchman.  (All he needed were teeth made of metal.)

            “So?”

            “So you can just take that and ‘escape.’  That way we’re not defying our orders, see?”

            Arthur nodded.  He saw all too well!  Slowly, he pushed his chair as far away from the table as he could.  For a moment, he thought about getting up, but decided against it.  (Too risky!)  Instead, he toppled the chair over sideways, sprawling himself across the floor.

            The goon laughed, until Arthur got up on his knees, facing the corner.  “What the fuck are you doing?”

            “If you want to shoot me, I won’t give you the excuse,” Arthur told him, putting his hands on his head.  “You can’t claim I was attackin’ you if you shoot me from behind.  And at this angle, you won’t be able to claim I was escapin’, either.  Especially not when the bullet goes on into the wall.”  (He didn’t need to spell it out.  He _knew_ he didn’t need to spell it out.  But his head was ringing too badly to think straight without thinking aloud, too.)

            “You fucking coward!”  There was a crashing sound.  (The table?)

            The gun went skittering across the floor and ended up near Arthur’s feet.  He kicked it away again.  If he had to die, better to become an obvious martyr—the clear victim of a tyrannical regime.  At least then history would vindicate him, even if no one currently living cared or even noticed that he was gone.

            “You think this display’s gonna stop me from shooting you?!” the man behind him bellowed.

            “I doubt anything will stop you from shootin’ me,” Arthur sighed.  There wasn’t any point to denying it.  “Just promise you’ll start callin’ my brother ‘Cain’ from now on.”  (Not that Arthur believed in any of that Biblical stuff.  But his brother put on the face of being a proper Anglican boy, just like anyone else.)

            “What kind of coward just sits there and asks to die?” the other man demanded.  “Why don’t you even want to escape?”

            “Anything that has to be taken at gunpoint isn’t worth ‘aving,” Arthur replied.  They seemed like suitable last words for a martyr.  If only he could be sure the world would somehow hear them!

            The sound of a gun being cocked.  “You know, there’s no reason for me not to shoot you right where you stand,” the man laughed.  “It’s not like there’s going to be an autopsy.”

            Arthur shut his eyes, wishing there was something he could do to save himself.  Or at least make certain that his killers would fall for their actions!

            A loud sound from behind him jarred Arthur so much that he nearly turned to look at the source of the sound.  It was a crashing sound, but very unlike the sound of the table being turned on its side.

            The sound was repeated.

            Again and again.

            The last time, there was a crackling sound, and the tinkling of broken glass.  Just a bit of it.

            “Stop it!” the man with the gun bellowed.  “Stop or I’ll blow his fucking brains out!”

            The sound stopped.

            “I wouldn’t do that, if I was you,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere behind Arthur.  He didn’t recognise the voice.  “I’m broadcasting live.  Do you want all of New York City—all of the world—to see you shoot an unarmed man in the back?”

            “Do you think I’m fucking stupid?!” the man demanded back.  The muzzle of his gun pressed up against the back of Arthur’s head.  (If he’d had the nerve, he could have tried to wrench it away.  And probably gotten shot in the face in the struggle.)

            “It’s true,” another man’s voice said.  “The bitch has a camera going.”

            The gun was withdrawn a bit from the back of Arthur’s skull, but he could still feel the coldness of the metal inches from the skin of his hands.

            “Just give up and let us in there,” another voice growled.

            “Curt…?”  (Could that have been Arthur’s imagination?  Was he hallucinating—hearing things—in his frantic desire for more life?)

            “Shit…”  The other man—one of the other bullies with the guns?—sounded disconsolate.

            “What’s going on in here?!” another man’s voice exclaimed in shock.  Arthur recognised the voice; he was one of those television prats.  (He wasn’t sure which one, though.  They all sounded the same, all weak Walter Cronkite-imitators.)

            “Fucking hell!”  An easily recognised voice.  Belonged to another television arse, plastic-faced and plastic-haired.  Did the cute, smarmy special reports on one of those obnoxious morning chat programmes.  (Such a big Tommy Stone fan that Arthur used to imagine the man begging for a chance to give Tommy a blowjob.  And that was _before_ Arthur knew who Tommy really was.  Now he realised that begging probably wouldn’t be required…)  “If we get footage of that guy’s head being blown off, it’ll run all day every day for years!”

            Arthur clamped his eyes shut, wishing he could shut his ears, too.

            The sound of a slap.  “What the hell is the matter with you?!”  The woman’s voice this time.  “The idea’s to _prevent_ his head being blown off, moron!”

            “Y-yeah, but…think about all those photos from Vietnam, right…?  The ones with the carnage are the ones that got all the awards…”

            “I think you’ve missed the point of journalism altogether,” another familiar voice sighed.  If Arthur wasn’t mistaken, he was the local newsreader for one of the major networks.  (Just how many people were on the other side of that one-way mirror, watching as Arthur knelt there in utter humiliation?)

            A new ruckus began filtering through the hole in the glass.  “Oh, sir!” the thug on the other side of the glass exclaimed, cutting through the voices of the television types.  “You gotta do something!  All these reporters just showed up outta nowhere!  They’re disrupting our important work!”

            In the lengthy pause that followed, Arthur realised his legs were starting to go numb.  One way or the other, if this wasn’t over soon, he was like to make a fool of himself.  Still, being a live fool would be preferable to being a dead one…

            “So much blood.  What a distressing sight.”  The sheer smarm in Nigel’s voice could have throttled an elephant.  (It choked Arthur’s throat with bile, and filled his eyes with blinding redness.)  “It seems these two have been overenthusiastic in serving their country.  I assure you, we’ll investigate and see to it that they’re punished for their crimes.”

            “You lying sack of shit!”  The man with the gun beat Arthur to the verbal punch.

            “Bloody liar!” was the best Arthur could come up with, as he struggled to his feet.

            “Ah, I see.  This is classified information, but I’m sure you’re all trustworthy men—though I’ll have to ask you turn off your cameras,” Nigel was saying, his voice all too calm.  Arthur was doing his best to stagger to the door, but between his tingling legs and barely being able to see, it was slow going.

            “Nothing doing,” the woman replied, sounding wary, but not wary enough.

            “This man is a foreign agent,” Nigel claimed.  “Probably Russian, though we haven’t been able to determine his exact allegiances yet.  But I’ve been in close contact with my embassy, and he is absolutely not a British citizen.”

            “You fucking traitor!”  Arthur finally made his way through the door, and could see that Nigel had (badly) applied make-up to cover the injuries Arthur had given him earlier.  Arthur swung his fist at his brother’s face again, but he lost his footing, falling forwards impotently instead, grabbing his shoulders to keep from falling over.  “Just how can you look at yourself in the mirror every day, bein’ such a bloody arsehole?!  Don’t you ever feel sorry for Mum?”  There was no point in expecting him to have any pity for _Arthur_.  But Nigel allegedly still cared for their mother…

            Nigel shoved him away with a snarl, then turned to look at the cameras.  (Someone caught Arthur, but he was too focussed on his detestable brother to care who was holding him up.)  “I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” he insisted.

            “You’re the one who ordered us to put a bullet in his skull!” the other thug (the one who _hadn’t_ spent the last half hour beating Arthur ragged) bellowed, taking his own swing at Nigel.  It connected, and Nigel’s face smashed into the wall with a satisfying _thud_.

            The woman with the camera suddenly moved towards Arthur.  “You’re the fellow we came here looking for, right?” she asked.  “The man who asked that question connecting Brian Slade with the Committee for Cultural Renewal.”

            “Y-yeah…”  Had that destroyed his life, or saved it?

            “So, who’s this man that’s trying to kill you?” she asked, gesturing at Nigel.

            Arthur chuckled grimly.  (He wished he hadn’t.  The movement inside his mouth made blood start dribbling out the corners of his lips, but he didn’t have the strength to wipe it away.)  “That soulless monster _used_ to be my brother.”

            “Filthy lies!” Nigel snarled.  “My only brother committed suicide ten years ago when the Queen of the Fairies had himself shot on stage!”

            “You motherfucker!”  Curt’s voice snarling right next to his ear nearly made Arthur’s heart stop beating.  (How had he not looked to see who was holding him up?  How had he not _known_ those were Curt’s strong hands on his waist and back?)

            “Any tie-breaking comment?” the woman with the camera asked, pointing the instrument at the thug who had been beating Arthur.

            “Yeah,” the man said, aiming a hateful glare at Nigel, “maybe.  He sure made it _sound_ like they was brothers.”

            “On the record?”

            “I’m only goin’ on record if you’re gonna make sure this limey goes down for trying to make me take the rap for obeying _his_ orders.”

            “It doesn’t bother you that he ordered you to kill his own brother?” the woman asked, her eyes widening.

            “What don’t concern me don’t concern me.  I’ve known a lot of guys who worked for the mob.  They’d have lived a lot longer if they’d kept their nose out of other people’s business.  I’m not making that mistake,” the thug insisted.  Given the dialect he was exhibiting, Arthur suspected the man used to work for the mob himself.  “But I’m not sitting by and taking it when someone tries to frame me for their own shit.”

            “If you want proof I’m tellin’ the truth, it’ll be easy to get,” Arthur said, looking around at the half-dozen television cameras all aimed at him.  “’Ave the footage broadcast in England.  Soon as Mum sees it, she’ll call lookin’ for me.  If she can recognise me with my face like this…”

            The woman with the camera smiled (as if she was looking at a basket of cuddling puppies).  “I’m sure the photo I was shown earlier will jog her memory,” she said.

            Curt’s hands tightened up a little, but didn’t say anything.  (He still had that Polaroid after all this time?)

            “I think we need to get the fellow to a hospital,” the major newsreader said.  “We can let a jury worry about who’s telling the truth.  That’s not really our job.”

            “I suppose so,” the woman sighed.  “We’ll keep broadcasting live until we’re safely out of this building, of course.  So don’t think of trying anything funny!” she added, pointing an accusing finger at Nigel.

            “You’re only digging your own graves,” Nigel insisted.  “This is a federal facility, and you are attempting to use what I can only call reverse blackmail in order to facilitate the escape of a dangerous foreign element.”

            “Let me stop you right there,” the major newsreader said.  “I’ve seen this man at dozens of press conferences over the last two or three years, and he hasn’t shown a single sign of being dangerous.  Usually spent most of the time getting pushed around by everyone else.”  (Arthur would have preferred not having that information shared on live television…)

            “Lying to defend him will only make your crime seem worse when it comes to trial,” Nigel replied, with a haughty smile.  Even though he knew bloody well that it was the truth!  He had, after all, spent years ensuring that Arthur would accept being pushed around in a pathetically docile fashion.

            “It’s not a lie,” the plastic man from the morning chat programme said.  His face looked astonishingly earnest.  Arthur wouldn’t have thought he _could_ look so honest.  “He first showed up at the press conference over that scandal in the mayor’s office three years ago—you know, the one about the teenage girl in the steno pool?  Kept to the back, trying to take notes while being stepped on by cameramen and tripping over electric wires.”  (Even Arthur had forgotten about that…though he certainly remembered it _now_.)

            Nigel looked at the plastic man with disgust.  “You’re a pouf as well, are you?”  (Obviously.)

            The other man flushed crimson, and didn’t answer.  Maybe he didn’t know what it meant.  The fellow was hardly good at hiding his homosexuality, after all.  Possibly not even trying to hide it, in fact.

            “Let’s just get the fuck out of here,” Curt said.  “Someone needs to call for an ambulance.”

            “We’ll take him in my van,” the woman with the camera replied, shaking her head.  “Don’t leave town,” she added, poking Nigel in the chest.  “I’ve got lots of friends in the NYPD, and they’re gonna want a few words with you, Mr. Stuart.”

            “How did you know my name?!”

            Arthur couldn’t fight his laughter.  “Bloody idiot,” he finally added around his chuckles.

            On that note, they started their slow progress out of the room, towards the lifts.  (By this point, Arthur’s legs had more or less recovered from his lengthy time on his knees, but he couldn’t bring himself to move away from Curt’s side.)  The woman with the camera kept narrating the whole time, giving considerable credence to her claim that they really were broadcasting live.  Sometimes she asked Arthur or Curt a question, but Arthur only bothered with the one she asked as they were waiting for the lift:  “Is this the first contact you’ve had with any of your family in the last ten years?”

            Arthur nodded.  “When I was gettin’ my passport, the officials looked over my record to make sure I wasn’t a criminal, and they started laughin’ right away.  I begged for an explanation, and eventually got them to tell me that I was reported as a runaway for precisely one day.  My mum reported it straight away when she saw me leavin’, but when the police called that night to follow through, my father told them I’d already come back.”  He sighed.  “Given that, I should ‘ave known he was stoppin’ Mum from gettin’ any mail from me.  Maybe some part of me did know, but I kept sendin’ the cards anyway.  Thought she was just cross with me for leavin’, and that maybe she’d forgive me if I kept on apologisin’…”

            “That’s so sweet!” the woman with the camera cooed.

            Once they were installed in the lift, Curt leaned Arthur against the corner, so he could stand in front and look into his eyes.  They didn’t say anything, but Curt gently stroked an unbruised portion of Arthur’s cheek a few times.  (If he hadn’t been in so much pain, the attention probably would have made Arthur embarrassingly aroused.)

            No one tried to stop them from leaving the building, and the young Dominican driver of the woman’s news van was soon clearing bits of wiring and spare equipment off a bench to one side of the van so Arthur could stretch out on it.  He was really starting to feel the effects of that beating he’d taken…

            Curt sat beside him, holding his hand tightly, but he didn’t talk; he just stared into Arthur’s eyes with worry written so powerfully in his furrowed brow that it made it painful for Arthur to look at him.  (Not that he even contemplated looking away.)

            The whole time they were en route, the woman kept trying to interview Arthur (and sometimes Curt) but she got very few answers.

            His strength was fading fast…


	4. Chapter 4

            The doctors had all told him that it was absurd for him to demand to stay in the room the whole time.  Apart from the broken ribs (which they couldn’t do much about other than bandaging his torso), Arthur had sustained very few serious injuries.  In fact, the doctors all seemed to think it was pointless to bother keeping him overnight for observation.

            And yet not one of them had suggested that maybe he should go home.

            Curt tried to tell himself he was just being paranoid.  (Even he didn’t believe it.)

            Arthur _seemed_ thrilled to have the company, but he didn’t actually say much.  Or anything at all.  Then again, he’d been shot up with some pretty heavy painkillers; he was barely conscious.

            By the time Mandy stopped by to visit, it was almost eight o’clock, and the first blush of the nighttime emergencies was beginning to wane.  Another half hour or so, and it might get quiet enough that those goons could disappear them both and no one would be the wiser until the next morning…

            “I saw you both on TV,” she told them, taking a seat on the chair next to the bed.  (Curt, of course, was sitting _on_ the bed.)  “So did the rest of the world, I guess,” she added, handing an envelope to Curt.  “I got that telegram a few hours ago.”

            “A few hours?” Curt repeated.  If it was so important for him to see it, then why hadn’t she come straight to the hospital to deliver it?

            “Have a look at it,” Mandy urged.

            Curt took the telegram out of the envelope, and looked it over.  “Mandy love,” it started, “you simply must come to stay with me in Paris for a while.  A month or two at least; you can’t see Paris in less than two months.  I have plenty of rooms to spare.  Bring along dear Curt and his adorable little friend.  I’m sending my plane to New York to fetch you.”  The telegram was signed “Jack Fairy.”

            “Shit, I haven’t heard from him in years,” Curt said, shaking his head.  “Beginning to think he was dead.”

            “Me, too,” Mandy agreed.  “You never know, he might be dying.  AIDS has been making short work of the circles we all used to travel in.”

            “Yeah…”  (Curt continually expected to wake up one morning and start seeing the symptoms in his own mirror.)

            “That’s why we have to go be with him, of course,” Mandy announced loudly.  So she figured the room was bugged, too.  “We can’t abandon such a wonderful friend at the end of his days.”

            “Absolutely,” Curt agreed.  Anything to get out of Reynolds’ reach.  The French weren’t likely to hand them over without good reason.  And they hadn’t done anything wrong.

            “So I’ve been at your place packing up some of your things,” Mandy went on.

            “How the fuck did you get into my apartment?!”

            “After all the times I’ve helped you home in a drunken stupor?” Mandy laughed.  “Your landlord let me in without question.”

            Curt sighed.  That seemed typical enough.  “So what did you do with my stuff?”

            “Your bags are with mine,” she answered.  Annoyingly vague, but it might keep Reynolds’ goons from stealing their luggage.  “I wasn’t sure what to do about…”  Mandy’s voice trailed off, and she looked over at Arthur uncomfortably.

            Following her gaze, Curt saw that Arthur looked like he was about to start crying.  “Where…where are you goin’…?” he asked, his voice trembling.  Shit.  He thought Curt was going to abandon him again?

            Curt tried to smile.  “We’re going to Paris to see Jack Fairy.  All three of us,” he added, clasping Arthur’s hand tightly.

            “Do you have any things you need to take with you?” Mandy asked.

            Arthur shook his head, then coughed, and nodded.  “Probably need my passport,” he chuckled weakly.  “It’s in my flat.”

            “I’ll get it for you,” Mandy said.  “Where are your keys?  Oh, and where do you live?”

            Arthur gave her his address (shit, his neighborhood was even worse than Curt’s!) and pointed her to his keys, still in the pocket of his slacks.  Mandy patted him on the head, and told him she’d be back soon.

            As improbable as it seemed for Jack Fairy ever to play the role of the cavalry, Curt was all for it.  Except for one slight problem:  if the Committee for Cultural Renewal had any idea they were trying to leg it, there was no way they’d still be alive by the time Jack’s plane touched down.  Someone would probably jump Mandy in Arthur’s apartment, even as someone else was quietly injecting Curt and Arthur both with some horrible lethal substance…

            Curt leapt to his feet as the door opened again.  They didn’t even wait five minutes, the fuckers!  But he didn’t plan on going down without a fight.

            To his surprise (and embarrassment), the aggressive posture wasn’t necessary, because it was Nell and her camera who walked through the door.  “I thought maybe you’d be more open to an interview now that you’ve had a chance to rest,” she told Arthur.

            “Uh…sure…” he answered uncomfortably.

            Curt could only shrug.  Nell’s ability to broadcast live whenever she fucking wanted had definitely saved their bacon earlier.  Maybe Mandy had asked her to come and keep an eye on them?

            By the time Mandy returned, Nell was struggling to find things to ask Arthur about.  He’d told her everything about how he found out Tommy Stone was Brian Slade (with some beautiful asides to Curt that made him so horny he wanted to fuck Arthur right there in the hospital, even if they _were_ on live TV), and he’d even had to tell the whole story about running away from home at seventeen (though he seemed to be dodging the issue of just _why_ he had decided to run away) and was in the laborious process of narrating the entire two years he spent living with the Flaming Creatures.  (Curt had never had any interest in learning that much about them.  They’d always struck him as particularly weird, even for glam rock.)

            “Okay, I’ve packed up everything in your apartment that looked like you might want it,” Mandy told Arthur.  “Get your clothes on, and we’ll head off to the airport.”

            “Oh…uh…but…”

            Curt chased Mandy and Nell out of the room so Arthur could get dressed without his body (and all those fucking hideous bruises!) being shared with all of New York.  Arthur still seemed confused, but coming from Curt, he accepted the commands gladly.

            Sneaking out of hotels, night clubs and concert venues was old hat.  Curt had been doing that for years.  (Sometimes for the same reason anyone else would.)  This was the first time he’d snuck out of a hospital.  Kind of a thrill, really.  (Firsts usually were.)

            Once they were out of the hospital, Mandy led the way to Nell’s news van, where a nervous Luis was waiting at the wheel.  The van was packed with baggage.  Curt recognized several suitcases that belonged to him (and his guitar cases, thank God!), and he had a feeling the really crummy-looking suitcase was probably Arthur’s.  The nice set of matching ones _had_ to be Mandy’s (left over from ten years ago, no doubt), but there were still more beyond that, which Curt couldn’t explain.

            They drove around in circles for some time, like they were trying to lose several dozen different vehicles tracking them, then started making their way to a small, under-used airfield well outside of town.  It was a private airfield, and Curt doubted it was even _legal_ for a plane to land there direct from outside the country.

            Not more than half an hour after they got there (about three in the morning), a plane started approaching.  It was all shiny chrome on the outside, small and sleek.  “Looks like a fucking UFO,” Curt grumbled under his breath.  He wasn’t sure if that was exactly the kind of ostentatious display he should expect from Jack, or if he was appalled by it.  Maybe a little of both.

            As soon as the plane came to a stop, a staircase/door was lowered from within.  Mandy led the way on board fearlessly, carrying one of her bags with her.  Curt took his guitars with him (he wasn’t letting the only things left of his once-great career out of his control!) and Arthur did his best to carry his own suitcase, refusing Curt’s offer of assistance.  At the top of the stairs, Curt was momentarily blinded by the ship’s (plane’s) interior:  everything that wasn’t mirrored was chrome, and there were altogether too many lights.  Jack really _wanted_ his plane to be a UFO, didn’t he?

            Several large men went down the stairs past them, and started bringing up the rest of the baggage from the van, even as a slender figure came towards them, smiling widely.  For a brief moment, Curt thought it was Jack, so wasted away with AIDS that he had lost a foot of height, but as the person drew nearer, Curt could see that they were younger, skinnier, shorter and Asian.  Just as androgynous as Jack, though.  Short black hair, a shimmering, elegant pantsuit, with no sign of breasts, an hourglass waist, or a manly bulge.  After staring long enough to be rude (not that Curt had ever cared about that), Curt decided the individual was a woman dressed as a man.

            The androgynous woman suddenly embraced Mandy, kissing her on both cheeks in turn.  “It is such great pleasure to meet you at last, Mademoiselle Mandy!” she exclaimed.  Unlike her appearance, her voice was decidedly feminine.  “Jacques has told me so much about you that it is as if we are old friends, no?”

            “I’m flattered he still thinks so fondly of me,” Mandy replied.  God, she was too fucking good at the whole ‘dealing with people’ thing.  This was one of those cases where Curt was grateful for his anti-social reputation.  “I’m sure if I’d been able to speak to him lately, he’d have told me just as much about you.  But I haven’t heard from him in _years_ , so you simply _must_ tell me all about yourself, and what darling Jack’s been up to since I heard from him last!”

            “But of course!  It will be my great pleasure,” the woman answered.  Was she Jack’s girlfriend?  Or some kind of protégé?  Maybe with Jack there wasn’t much difference?

            “Wait, I wanna know what the fuck’s going on here,” Curt demanded.  “Who are you, why the _fuck_ hasn’t Jack contacted any of us in years, what the hell’s up with this freaky plane, and why did he suddenly demand a visit out of the blue like this?!”

            The woman laughed quietly, and shook her head.  “You must be exhausted, Monsieur Wild,” she said.  “Jacques said you are fond of a small drink in the evening.  Would that make you feel more at ease?”

            “Not really.”  This was not a time to be drunk.  That could come later.  If there was going to _be_ a later.

            The woman looked at him sadly, then turned a pleasant smile at Arthur.  “Please do seat yourself anywhere, Monsieur.”

            “Er, yes, but…I think I’d like to know the answer to Curt’s questions, too,” Arthur replied.

            Her smile became strained.  “My name is Michelle, and to Jacques…I am his _bon ami_.”  With anyone else, Curt would have no doubts that was a euphemism.  In this setting…she was probably completely on the level.  Jack was nothing if not unfathomable.

            “So that’s answered _one_ question,” Curt pointed out, sitting down in one of the seats and putting his feet up on the table in front of it.  He’d never seen an airplane interior that was assembled more like a lounge than a plane before, but…honestly, he was more surprised _not_ to see a piano or microphone stand than he was to see a coffee table.

            “Jacques enjoys the way this looks,” Michelle said, gesturing at the plane.  “Do you not?”

            Curt shrugged.  “Feels more like a love motel than an airplane.”  (He was suddenly very aware of Arthur’s leg in the next seat, pressed up against his own.)  Curt coughed.  “But I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.”

            “This isn’t gonna turn into some creepy gay porno as soon as the plane takes off, right?” Luis suddenly asked, in a squeaky voice.  What the fuck was he doing on the plane with them?

            Nell laughed.  “I’ve got the camera, if you want to experiment,” she offered.  Wait, were those two coming, too?  The telegram hadn’t said anything about that!

            “Jacques would be most distressed if anything unpleasant took place on his precious airplane,” Michelle told him, beaming a smile at the boy that should have calmed just about anybody.  Didn’t seem to do a thing for Luis.  Maybe he somehow didn’t pick up on the fact that she was a girl?)

            One of the large men said something to Michelle, then pulled the door shut before disappearing (like his fellows) through the doorway to the cockpit.  Michelle sat down in the nearest chair, and fastened her seat-belt.  Everyone else quickly followed suit, and within minutes, the plane was rolling forwards.  (Made Curt regret his choice of seat, because he was facing the tail of the plane.)

            They all stayed silent until long after the plane was in the air, when a man’s voice from the front announced something over an intercom.  Michelle smiled, and removed her seatbelt.  “We are now over international waters,” she told them.  “You may relax your fears from President Reynolds.”

            “I still wanna know why Jack offered us this way out,” Curt insisted.  “There’s no fucking way all that stuff was being shown in _Paris_.”

            Michelle tilted her head to one side, her brow furrowing quizzically.  “Stuff, Monsieur Wild?”

            “He didn’t see the broadcast?” Mandy asked, sounding surprised.

            “Jacques told me that he received a telephone call from an old friend,” Michelle informed her, “asking that he do something to help you.”

            “What old friend?” Arthur asked.

            “Jacques did not tell me his whole name,” Michelle said.  “He only told me his Christian name.”

            “I don’t understand,” Nell said.  She was probably speaking for everyone in the room.

            “Jacques told me that his friend Brian asked that he help Mademoiselle Mandy and Monsieur Wild.”

            Brian…?

            “But the telegram mentioned _him_ , too,” Mandy pointed out, aiming a slender finger in Arthur’s direction.  “How…?!”

            Michelle shrugged.  “You will have to ask Jacques about that.  I have told you all that he told me.”

            “So why didn’t he come in person?” Curt asked.  “Given what we were running away from, how could he expect us to trust a total stranger like this?”

            “Jacques had obligations in Paris that he could not get out of.  But he will be waiting for us when we land, I promise you.”

            “What kind of obligations?” Mandy asked.  “What could be more important to him than me or Curt—or Brian?!”  Poor Mandy.  She sounded like she was about to start crying.

            “There are many requirements on his time,” Michelle answered, looking distressed.  “Most are very dull and technical.  I am sure he would have laid those aside for your sake, Mademoiselle Mandy, but he had a live appearance scheduled that could not be changed.”  How could any of them have argued with that?  The audience was supposed to be king.  And Jack had been better than most at remembering that.  “It is a very long flight to Paris,” Michelle went on, with a soft, mysterious smile, very like Jack’s, “and I am sure you must be quite tired already.  If you would like to lie down, there are small bed chambers just through here,” she added, gesturing towards the back wall of the area where they were.  It was closed off with a silvery curtain, the fabric slightly iridescent and holographic, like the fabric on the cushions of the seats.

            Luis nearly jumped out of his skin at the word ‘bed’ (despite that there were the same number of men and women in the room, and Arthur barely counted, considering how badly injured he was), making Nell start laughing at him.  Curt still didn’t understand why they were bringing that boy with them.  Nell had played a major role in the breakout and escape, so it made sense that Reynolds’ goons might take her down for it, but Luis was never on camera, and played no part in anything.  Then again, the getaway driver in a heist movie was always just as much a wanted fugitive as his more glamorous buddies, wasn’t he?

            “I believe I could use the rest,” Arthur agreed.  He started trying to get to his feet, but it didn’t seem to be going very well.  Curt quickly helped him up, and they headed towards that curtain.

            Beyond the curtain there was a narrow hallway of doors.  Everything was just as shiny and glittery as the rest of the plane, but it wasn’t as well lit.  Because it was so narrow, they had to proceed down the hall single file.  Arthur opened one of the doors and peered inside.  “There’s a case in here,” he announced.  “Don’t recognize it.  Must be Michelle’s.”

            Curt checked the door opposite.  He didn’t find any luggage in it.  (Much better than luggage!)  “This one,” he said, turning to Arthur with a grin.  “We’re using this one.”

            Arthur turned to look at him, a puzzled look on his face (puzzled and pained; half his face was either black or blue, and half his chin was hidden under a big, ugly bandage) but if he was expecting an explanation, he didn’t wait long for one, and soon went through the open door in front of Curt.  A slight sound escaped his lips as he came in sight of the double-size bed.  Pity there wasn’t anything in the room other than the bed.  There wasn’t more than a foot or two of floor, even.

            As soon as Curt had passed through the door himself, he closed it, and checked for a lock.  There wasn’t one, just one of those flimsy “OCCUPIED/VACANT” latches that anyone could break with a heavy shove.  (But was anyone really likely to break in on them anyway?)  By the time Curt had turned the little dial to read “OCCUPIED,” and turned back towards the rest of the room, Arthur was already sitting on the edge of the bed, wincing as he tried to reach down to untie his shoes.

            “Fuck, you’re gonna make it worse,” Curt sighed.  “Lemme do it.”  While Arthur flushed a charming shade of pink (where he wasn’t too bruised), Curt knelt down and started taking his shoes off for him.  (Not that having to act like the father of a two year old was exactly a turn-on.)  While he was doing that, the small light that had turned on when he opened the door shut off again, leaving them in near-darkness lit only by glow-in-the-dark specks on the ceiling, pinpricks that looked much more like stars than those cheesy things they sold parents to put above their kids' beds.

            Once that was done, Curt helped Arthur lie down on his back in the bed, then slipped out of his own shoes, and got under the covers.  Lying on his side, tight against Arthur’s side, Curt bent his head and upper torso over him, pressing a passionate kiss against his lips.  They had barely started kissing when Arthur let out a yelp of a moan into Curt’s mouth.  (Sounded like the kind of noises Curt made when the anesthetic wore off too soon at the dentist’s office.)

            Curt lifted his head again.  “What hurts?” he asked, not sure what else he could say.

            Arthur smiled weakly.  “Most things, actually.”  He lifted one hand up to the bandage on his chin.  “This, primarily,” he added.  “Everything’s likely to keep hurtin’ until this hole in my lip’s closed up.”

            Curt sighed miserably.  So much for kissing.  And even he wasn’t selfish enough to fuck someone with freshly broken ribs.  “We’ll just sleep then,” he said, lowering his head to the pillow.  Cuddling was better than (being) nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I didn't overdo Michelle's dialog. I wanted to convey that her English was a little awkward (since it's a second language) without making it broken. If any native French speakers happen to see this, I apologize profusely if I've offended you. It wasn't intended to be offensive.


	5. Chapter 5

            Arthur woke in total darkness.  All around him was a heavy, mechanical sound he couldn’t place.  Beside him he could feel the warmth of another human body, and a heavy arm was wrapped about his waist, as if to keep him from escaping.  Worst of all, his whole body ached, especially his face and his ribs.

            In a panic, he tried to sit up, but that only made his rib cage hurt more.

            The man beside him let out a sleepy groan, and pulled him closer.  It didn’t feel like an imprisoning gesture.  It was more like a lover’s touch, warm and affectionate.

            Awkwardly, Arthur settled back down again, and tried to remember where he was.  Everything came rushing back to him as he replayed the previous day’s events.  Thank God it was Curt’s arm around him!  (Especially since the hand had since strayed down a bit towards his privates…)  Now that he knew the sound he was hearing was the plane’s engines, it seemed a gentle, reassuring sound that could have quickly lulled Arthur back to sleep if he wasn’t in quite so much pain.  And if he was a bit less hungry.

            He wondered how long they had been asleep, and that soon led him into uncounted unanswerable mental questions.  (How close were they to France?  How long would it be before they were on the ground?  How long would it be before Arthur could get some pain medication?  Would they be arrested by agents of the American government as soon as they landed?  Would Curt be upset if Arthur woke him to see if there was any breakfast available?)

            It felt as though Arthur had been lying there awake a long time before Curt snuggled closer, and his hand slipped down further, caressing him through his trousers.  The snuggling could, in theory, have been in his sleep.  The other was clearly wakeful.

            “Ah…I…” Arthur started, but quickly stopped again, not sure how to phrase it that wouldn’t sound just dreadful.  There was also the fact that he wasn’t sure just how casually Curt would accept being addressed.  They did, after all, barely know each other.  (Though it was hard to remember that while Curt was fondling his balls.)

            “What is it?” Curt asked in a low whisper.  He didn’t wait for an answer, and started sucking on Arthur’s earlobe instead.

            “This…um…might sound a little selfish,” Arthur admitted.

            “Don’t worry about that.”

            Arthur sighed.  “It’s just…I’m rather hungry…”  By Arthur’s calculation, the time from the last time he had eaten anything to the plane taking off was at least twenty hours.

            For a moment, the room was deathly quiet (apart from the engines and the rush of air outside).  Then Curt laughed.  “Yeah, I guess it’s been a while since dinner, huh?”

            “They didn’t give me any dinner,” Arthur pointed out.

            Curt cleared his throat.  “Right…sorry…”  He let go of Arthur (sadly!), then sat up.  “Shit, it’s dark in here.  Aren’t there any fucking lights?”

            “Maybe there’s a switch by the door?” Arthur suggested.  There had been light last night, after all.

            Curt got out of the bed, and Arthur could hear him fumble about for a minute or two.  Eventually, he opened the door, causing a dim overhead light to turn on.  “This’ll have to do,” he said, before putting his shoes back on, and helping Arthur out of bed and into his own shoes.  He would have resisted—if not refused—the help, if it weren’t for the fact that all his muscles ached and didn’t want to move at all.

            Between hunger, pain, and a certain unsteadiness caused by rising from a deep slumber while hurtling through the air, getting back to the main cabin of the aircraft took a surprisingly long time.  When they arrived, Arthur was shocked (and somewhat horrified) to see that the interview conducted with him in the hospital was being shown on a large screen in the room.

            “What the fuck’s going on in here?” Curt demanded.

            The woman with the camera immediately shut it off again, laughing nervously.

            “Mademoiselle Nell was simply showing us the footage she brought along with her,” Michelle explained.  “It is very distressing to see what the American government did to you,” she added, looking at Arthur with a sympathetic smile.  He’d buy that more if she’d actually been watching a part that contained the abuse he had suffered.

            “All that aside, is there any chance of something to eat?” Arthur asked.  There was no point in getting upset.  He didn’t have the strength for it.  “And maybe a cup of tea, something to give me a little energy.”

            “I have just the thing for that,” Michelle assured him.  “Please seat yourselves, and I will bring you out a meal right away.”

            They sat down, but no one seemed to want to talk to them.  It didn’t help that they had walked in on the most embarrassing part of the recording, when Arthur had been talking about coming to understand just how he really felt about Curt.  (No wonder none of them wanted to speak to him—or even look him in the eye!)  So they sat in silence until Michelle returned with a silver tray containing two covered dishes, and a teapot with two cups.  She placed the tray on the table in front of where Curt and Arthur were sitting, then removed the covers from the dishes, revealing eggs, bacon and croissants.  It all smelled quite heavenly, and Arthur wasn’t even ashamed of the way his stomach was growling.

            When Arthur started pouring out a cup of the tea, though, it both looked and smelled a bit odd.  “What kind of tea is this?” he asked.

            “It is coca tea,” Michelle replied, with a gentle smile.  “It has been a favourite of Jacques’ since visiting Peru some years ago.  It is most excellent for giving you energy.”

            Curt pushed his (still empty) cup far away from him.  “Not for me.  I’m clean.”

            Michelle frowned at him.  “There is nothing narcotic about—”

            “Just gimme a cup of water or something.”

            “If you wish, Monsieur Wild.”  Michelle soon returned with a glass of water, but she looked disappointed by the whole idea.

            Arthur figured he could use the energy, so he went ahead and had the coca tea.  It wasn’t bad, actually.  By the time he had finished his breakfast, he was feeling much more lively, but everything still hurt.  Unfortunately, that meant he couldn’t indulge Curt’s (and his own!) desires as the plane continued its journey towards Paris.

            On the other hand, they had slept long enough that they didn’t have to wait too much longer before the plane landed.

            Arthur had never been to France before (and the minimal French he had learned in school was quite abysmal) but even so he could tell that they were landing at a private airstrip well outside the city.  Being smuggled out of one country and into another like this made him feel like an illegal immigrant.  Perhaps that was exactly what he had become.  (Actually, it would have been quite exciting if he hadn’t been in so much pain.)

            An elegant 1940s-style limousine (all in silver again) was waiting for them at the side of the runway.  As they disembarked, the door to the limousine opened, and someone stepped out.  Arthur was momentarily blinded by the sunlight reflecting off that slender figure.

            Mandy was closest to the new arrival, and could see his face before any of the other refugees could.  “Jack, darling!” she exclaimed, before running over to embrace him in a huge hug.

            She was just stepping away as Curt and Arthur drew close enough for Arthur to get a good look at the Jack Fairy of 1984.  His garment was a traditional Chinese robe (for some reason), but all in silver lamé, and embellished with embroidery done in silver thread.  The last ten years had been far more kind to Jack than to anyone else present on that runway; his face was barely altered at all.  His hair was laced a bit with silver, but it seemed to have been artfully applied in a salon.  Especially since it had a metallic sparkle to it.

            Curt clapped Jack on the back, but didn’t go in for a hug, though Jack seemed to be offering.  “Why the fuck didn’t you keep in touch with anyone?” Curt demanded.

            Jack smiled that mysterious smile he was so famous for, and shook his head.  Then he extended his hand towards Arthur.  “A pity we did not quite meet ten years ago,” he said.

            Arthur found himself gaping a moment in shock before he could even remind his body how to move enough to take Jack’s hand.  (Did Jack Fairy actually remember him?  From those thirty seconds or so in which they had passed each other on the street?)

            “You know, you’re the one who kept telling me it’d be a bad idea to call him,” Curt said, almost in a growl.  (Oh, he’d seen the Polaroid.  That made much more sense…)

            “The Creatures would have been crushed,” Jack replied lightly, as he released Arthur’s hand.  Then, with a brief smile for Nell and Luis, he got back into the limousine without another word.

            Everyone quickly piled in after him.  Once the doors were shut, Jack spoke to the driver in French, and the car set off driving.  “Hey, what about my stuff?!” Luis shouted.

            “The staff will bring the bags along,” Michelle assured him, with a pleasant smile and a pat on his hand.  This time, the boy smiled awkwardly, looking embarrassed and a little flattered.  He must have come to realise that she was a woman…

            “I still want to know what’s going on,” Mandy said.  “It can’t really have been Brian that called you.”

            “Of course it was,” Jack assured her.  “He was quite distraught, the poor thing.”

            “That’s just bullshit!” she shrieked.  “If Brian was so fucking worried about us, then why the hell did he ever put us in that position in the first place?!”

            Jack shook his head.  “He didn’t say.”

            “Jacques, I believe what is happening is much worse than your friend led you to think,” Michelle told him, then launched into a flurry of French so fast that Arthur barely caught one word in a hundred.

            To Arthur’s surprise, Nell started chiming in as well, her French nearly as fluid as Michelle’s.  The three of them spent most of the drive talking amongst themselves, without explaining a thing to anyone else.

            Only as the car pulled through a wrought iron gate (which shut behind them) and began to approach a dreadfully Rococo palace did the French conversation come to a stop.  “We will of course send for a doctor for you, Monsieur Stuart,” Michelle said, “but I think we will have need of your appearance as it is first.”

            “You…what?”

            “Someone pulled the plug,” Nell said, her voice almost a squeak.  “All that ‘live footage’ I was shooting?  Barely five minutes of it actually went on air!  But I’ve got it all with me!  We’re going to edit it and show it in Europe, where they can’t get at us.”

            “What’s that got to do with me?” Arthur asked, though he had a feeling he knew the answer.  (And he didn’t like it.)

            “If you can film an intro while you still look like you’ve just had the shit beat out of you, it’s gonna make everything that much more powerful,” Nell assured him.  “Bloody clothes and all.”

            “Then you can have fine clothes to match,” Jack added, just as the car drove past a sign (inside the wrought iron fence around the property) that read “VdlF”.  (Vêtements de la Fée belonged to Jack Fairy?  Why had Arthur never learned that?  Surely that should have come up at some point in all the reports of its recent domination over the European fashion design shows…)

            They continued to hammer out the details a bit as the car slowly moved around to the back of the palace and came to a stop in front of what would have been the servants’ entrance back when it was used by the nobility.  Jack led their little parade through the kitchens (still a working kitchen, and cooking for at least twenty, by the look of things) and in and out of rooms big and small until they came to a plain room filled only with the pure white canvases used to diffuse light in professional photography.  Nell announced it was the perfect place to film the introduction, and promptly sat Arthur down on a stool.

            While Michelle and a few strange men fussed over Arthur, trying to comb his hair a bit (not to mention shave him without disrupting the sticking plaster on his chin) without removing the general “just suffered a bloody beating” look, Nell and Luis set the camera up on a tripod, and Nell explained to Arthur just what the footage would be like when she was done with it, what she needed him to say in introducing it.

            Eventually, all that could be done for his unkempt appearance had been done, and the lights were turned on, nearly blinding Arthur.  And, just like that, he was expected to speak.  “My name’s Arthur Stuart,” he started.  (Best to start with the basics.)  “Until I was seventeen, I lived in Manchester with my family.  They were just like everyone else, and everyone thought I was just like them, but I wasn’t.  I wasn’t the only boy in Britain who got the courage to accept himself because he’d seen how Brian Slade was willin’ to admit to the world that he was bisexual.  If a big star could love men and still be loved, we thought we could, too.  I learnt all too well it wasn’t so easy when my father found out.  I ran off to London, where I’d be accepted.  But even that didn’t last, and soon I was runnin’ again, to America.”

            He stopped, taking a breath and trying to right his thoughts.  This seemed to be taking far too long.  “I knew better by the time I arrived in New York.  I kept to myself.  Didn’t let anyone know who I really was; what I really was.  I was a new person in all but name.”  Arthur shook his head.  “Someone else came to New York about the same time, became someone new.  But he did change his name.  And he rose up to prominence, maybe even more than he’d had before.  And the Committee for Cultural Renewal took it on themselves to guard his secret.  Anyone who tried to learn the truth was silenced, one way or another.  Until I was so bloody stupid as to shout it out at a Presidential press conference.  Then they couldn’t protect Tommy Stone’s secret any longer.  And if they couldn’t protect him, they wanted at least to destroy the man responsible for telling the world that he was really Brian Slade.”

            Arthur shut his eyes again.  What else was he supposed to say?  “I was imprisoned without trial—without the rights of an American or an Englishman—and beaten savagely.  Not just at the command of the Committee for Cultural Renewal, but on the orders of one of the men the Prime Minister loaned them.  My own brother.  He told them to make me suffer before snuffin’ me out like a candle.”  Feeling his voice start to shake, Arthur clenched his fists, and tried to focus.  This wasn’t about him.  It wasn’t about his brother.  It was about stopping Reynolds.  “Whatever the Committee for Cultural Renewal was originally supposed to be, it’s become an instrument of social control.  We can’t let it continue.”

            “Okay, that’s good enough,” Nell said.

            “Wait!” Arthur added, stretching out a hand to the camera.  He lowered the hand again, and did his best to smile.  “Mum, if you see this, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry I ran off like that.  I’m sorry it’s been ten years.  And I’m sorry you’re ‘aving to see me like this.  But I’m still here, and I plan on stayin’ alive as long as I can.”

            This time, he let Nell shut off the camera.  As the little red light turned off again, Arthur felt as though the only thing that had been holding him upright had dissolved, and he practically dribbled off the stool onto the floor.

            He had barely picked himself up again when Curt and the others returned.  Jack had apparently provided his old friends with clothes from his glamorous (and exceptionally expensive) clothing line.  Mandy was now wearing a beautiful black dress with silver woven through it at odd angles, and Curt was wearing a soft-looking silk shirt and a nice pair of slacks.  Modern, but still stylish enough to be appropriate for a rock god like Curt.

            After some discussion, Curt took Arthur’s place on the stool and recorded an introduction in German (punctuated by the occasional outburst in English to lament how rusty his German was), then Jack himself sat down and recorded one in French.  Mandy insisted she wanted to take part, too, and sat down to record something to be played at the end, but she broke down halfway through, and Jack ushered the men out while Michelle tried to calm her.

            Jack’s personal physician had long since arrived, it turned out, and was waiting to look over Arthur’s injuries and give his own diagnosis.  Given that no one had actually expected Arthur to live out the night back in New York, the American hospital’s diagnosis was no longer trusted.  By the time that was over, Arthur was exhausted, and ready to get some more sleep.

            Curt helped him into a ridiculously lavish bed (feather beds were almost as difficult to deal with as water beds, evidently), then leaned down to whisper in his ear.  “Hurry up and get better so we can fuck,” he urged.  “I bet Jack’ll let us go up on the roof.  He says you can see a hell of a lot more stars here than in London…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I did it. I committed the cardinal sin of making Jack Fairy talk. :o But given his role in the story, it was going to be exceptionally difficult to get around that! (I'm not ashamed of making him a high fashion designer, though. That seems like someplace he could totally go.)
> 
> Also, I know I mentioned something earlier about Curt needing a local fan to translate for a German cop, and yet here had him speak enough German to record an introduction. The idea there is that he hadn't--by Feb. 5th, 1974--learned enough German to be able to communicate with the police officer properly, but since he and Jack would have stayed in Berlin quite a while to work on their album, he picked up a fair chunk of the language in that time. I didn't really have a good place to insert that in the story (and to a certain extent it seems like extraneous exposition) but I didn't want it just sitting here as an inconsistency, either. (It's still an inconsistency, but at least it's a conscious one.)


	6. Chapter 6

            Arthur spent most of the day sleeping.  Jack insisted that was a normal side effect of the pain medication his doctor had provided, but it left Curt worried all the same.

            Not that he didn’t have a lot of other stuff to worry about.  “Eventually, we’re going to have to do _something_ about it,” Mandy sighed.  “Once Nell’s report airs, they’ll know we’ve gotten out of the country, and they’re going to come looking for us.”

            “Is it too late to shoot a new French intro?” Curt asked, looking at Nell.  “Having Jack talking for us is gonna be a dead giveaway that we’re here.”

            “Way too late.  I mean, we could provide a new one and hope they’d be willing to use it instead of the one they’ve got, but…”

            “It wouldn’t matter anyway.  There are only so many places we could go,” Mandy pointed out.  “The question is what the French government will do when Reynolds’ men come looking for us.”

            “The first thing they’ll do is look at the customs records, and see that we didn’t officially enter the country,” Nell said.  “Then, well…I don’t know.  Mitterrand has kept things very friendly with America, but I don’t think there’s anything personal in those politics:  I think he just figures that if the Cold War turns hot, he’ll want to be on the American side.  I doubt he has any fondness for Reynolds.  It’ll all depend on how the appeal to the French government is handled.  If they can make us sound like dangerous criminals, the French will gladly hand us over.”

            Curt sighed deeply.  “I guess if the worst happens, we can hide behind the Iron Curtain.  I’ve still got some friends in Berlin; they’d be able to sneak us into East Berlin easily enough, and then we could claim asylum.”

            “East Berlin is not exactly where I want to spend the rest of my life,” Mandy said, with a grimace.

            “It’s not as bad as you think.”  Curt shrugged.  “Seems like a dumbass reason to have to end up in hiding, though.”  (They all agreed on that!)

            “I wonder how much warning we’ll have?” Mandy asked, through a deep sigh.

            The only conclusion any of them could come to was “not enough.”

            They sat there in an uncomfortable silence until Arthur came slowly through the door into the sitting room.  Mandy noticed him first (unfortunately!) and she let out a half-repressed laugh at the sight.  (It wasn’t funny at all!)  He was still wearing his rumpled and blood-stained clothing, and his hair was a disaster, but perhaps the most notable thing was that the bandage had fallen off his chin, and he still hadn’t shaved, leaving a square patch on the center of his jaw that had two days’ growth of stubble, where the rest of it had only one.  (Still not funny.)

            Curt got up and walked over to him.  “You okay?”

            “Still tired,” Arthur admitted, with a sheepish, sedate smile.  “And a bit stiff.”

            Despite himself, Curt had to check.  But Arthur hadn’t meant _that_ kind of stiff.  “You had anything to eat yet?”

            Arthur shook his head.  “They said they’d bring me in something.”

            Curt nodded, and helped him over to a chair (though he didn’t really seem to need the help), and the three of them filled Arthur in on the situation while they waited for his breakfast to arrive.

            After Arthur had eaten, Curt offered to help him get cleaned up, just in case anyone happened to see him.  Jack’s place was crawling with French models, after all.  As they left the room together, Curt ignored Mandy’s ribbing about how very ‘attentive’ he was being.

            Despite that Arthur had ignored them when he got up, a half dozen nice outfits had been brought up to his room, and Curt was determined to make sure he didn’t go back downstairs in anything less than the best of them.  But first he’d need a shower and a shave.  Of course, Curt was eager to help…

            The hot water seemed to do wonders for Arthur’s aching muscles, but they couldn’t kiss for very long before he complained that his lip still hurt (even though it was scabbed over), and Curt knew there was no way his ribs had healed enough for sex to be safe yet.  Even without sex, the shower was still a beautiful experience.

            By the time they went downstairs again, it was nearly time for the broadcast.  Everyone had assembled in a room that was practically a theater.  Curt steered Arthur over to sit near Jack, but he made sure he had the seat in between them.  Jack had never seemed like the type to poach another man’s boyfriend, but Curt didn’t want to run that risk _now_.  Not after he’d been forced into this crazy disaster purely to protect Arthur.  Jack, of course, complimented Arthur on how nice he looked in his new suit (a creamy silk, brown with just a hint of rosy pink) which made Arthur blush like a schoolgirl.  Sitting between them had _definitely_ been the right call.

            When the broadcast of Nell’s edited footage finally started on the local French news, Curt was glad to see that this wasn’t one of those tacky broadcasts that speaks over the original in their own language; they put French subtitles on the screen, and let the English stand untainted.  (Maybe they figured their viewers all spoke enough English not to need a dub-over?)

            Of course, Curt had been there for almost all of it, so there weren’t any surprises.

            Until the end.

            After Nell’s footage was over, the French newscaster told the audience that they had a second tape to run, this one having come to them from England.  And then the footage started.  It showed Tommy/Brian, sitting in a nondescript kitchen somewhere.  His hair was still in that hideous style, but he was wearing normal clothes instead of that sequined white suit.

            “I’ve been forced to do a lot of thinking in the last 48 hours,” he started.  Not quite Tommy’s voice, but not Brian’s either; it was halfway between them.  “Trying to identify where I went wrong—at what point I should have said ‘no’ and walked away.”  He shook his head.  “It was always presented to me as benign.  A few threats, perhaps, but never violence.  Never actual harm.”  He lifted one hand, revealing the backs of two Polaroid pictures, at which he was staring intently.  “I’ve made bigger mistakes in my life than most.”  He set the Polaroids down on the table, and the camera followed the movement, panning around to show the audience what those pictures were of.  “Most people are lucky if they can find even one person they value more than their lives.  I found two, and yet I drove them both away.”  The pictures came into focus.  One was of Mandy with her arm around a man Curt had never seen before.  The other was one of those pictures Curt had allowed those girls to take:  he and Arthur were posing for the camera, arms around each other, smiling widely, as if they had found a paradise to which no one else would ever be invited.  (If Arthur had let him keep one of _those_ photos instead of the sneak shot, nothing would have stopped Curt from calling him…)  “Following the exposure of my secret, the people who were supposedly protecting me began to talk of killings.  Not just the killing of the stranger who exposed me, but also of the people most dear to me, who had helped him to escape.”  The camera returned to Tommy’s face.  The lines of worry crossing it made him look decades older.  (And yet, also made him look more like Brian again, somehow.)  “When I objected, I was reminded that the disruption caused was merely an inconvenience for me, while it was an injury which could prove fatal to their organization.  They insisted I should be grateful to them for covering it up again.  And that if I was not, then perhaps it was time to reconsider my position with them.”  He laughed sadly.  “So I did reconsider.  Not just my alliance with them, but everything I have done with my life in the last five years.”  He pressed his lips together into a thin line.  Brian used to do that whenever he didn’t want to admit he’d fucked up…  “I haven’t figured out my answers to everything yet, but I knew I could no longer be associated with those people who were so ready to turn to murder.  So I have returned home, and I will be remaining here until I can come to an understanding with myself as to what I should be doing, and who I truly am.”  He smiled a soft, embarrassed smile.  “If there are any people watching this who still have interest in the career of Tommy Stone after the last two days—people who still wanted to attend my upcoming concerts—then I can only apologize for the cancellations of those concerts.  But I cannot hold them now.”

            He made a gesture to someone off camera, and the recording abruptly stopped, returning to the French newsroom.  While the response to the videos started, Mandy got to her feet and ran out of the room into the hall just beyond, where a telephone rested on a little table near the door.  She picked up the phone and started dialing numbers frantically.

            “Let me speak to Brian,” she said after a moment.  “No, Mother Slade, it’s me, Mandy!  Please, I need to talk to him.”  Mother Slade?  That was a fucked up way to address a mother-in-law, wasn’t it?  _Ex_ -mother-in-law at that.  Curt hadn’t even realized Mandy had ever _met_ Brian’s parents…

            Jack was soon gliding towards the door, and closing it to give Mandy some privacy.  (Curt didn’t mean to, but he frowned.  He had wanted to listen in on _that_ conversation.)  Nell, meanwhile, was bitching to Luis that ‘Tommy Stone’s’ visually drab little recording was going to completely overshadow all her hard work, and instead of getting an award, she was going to be utterly ignored!  Luis didn’t seem to know how to handle her complaints (and Curt wasn’t about to get himself involved in that).

            Curt turned to look at Arthur, and found that Arthur was already looking at him, but with this heart-breaking expression on his face.  His eyebrows were angling up so sharply that it looked like they were trying to crawl up and meet in the center of his forehead.  “What’s wrong?”

            “It’s all my fault,” Arthur said, his voice shaking.  “You bein’ in this mess—this mess at all—it’s all because I had to go and say something so stupid.  If I’d just had the sense to keep my mouth shut…”

            “Arthur, they’re fucking _murderers_.  You exposing them is a good thing,” Curt pointed out.

            “But I shouldn’t ‘ave done it like that.  And draggin’ you into it…”

            “You didn’t drag me into anything,” Curt reminded him.  “I knew the risks.  And I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t gotten involved.”

            Arthur nodded uncomfortably, his eyes sliding shut.  “I _do_ appreciate it,” he insisted.  “You saved my life.  It’s just…”

            Curt sighed, and put an arm around Arthur’s shoulders, pulling him closer.  “Just calm down, okay?”  Kid looked like he was about to burst into tears at any second.

            They sat there like that for only a moment or two before Arthur pulled out of it.  “I…if…”

            “If what?”

            Arthur started to bite his lip, then winced at the pain as his teeth brushed the scab on his lower lip.  (At least, that was Curt’s read on what happened.)  “I shouldn’t be takin’ up your time right now,” he said.  This time, it wasn’t just his voice shaking:  his whole body was trembling.

            “What the fuck are you talking about?  What else would I be doing?”  Curt had no intention of letting Arthur out of his sight any longer than necessary.  Until they actually had sex again, they weren’t _technically_ involved, and Jack’s palace was fucking _crawling_ with sexy Frenchmen.  No way in hell was Curt letting one of them get at Arthur while he was still available!

            Arthur glanced over at the closed door standing between them and Mandy.  “You…you wanted to join in that call, didn’t you?”

            It wasn’t the right reaction (at all!), but Curt started laughing.  “You’re jealous?  That’s so fucking cute!”  Gently, he steadied Arthur’s face by a hand on his chin, and kissed him passionately.  “I don’t care how much he claims he regrets it, how much he pretends I was so fucking important to him.  If Brian really cared about me, he’d have stopped those motherfuckers from railroading me.”  (Curt was also under the decided impression that a number of the largest inmates had actually been bribed to rape him as many times as possible.  However, they had never managed to _succeed_ , so it was hard to hold much grudge about that.)

            There was a battle going on across Arthur’s face:  his eyebrows still seemed convinced Curt was about to rip his heart out, his eyes were soaring with hopeful enthusiasm, and his mouth kept back-and-forthing between the beginning of his endearing grin and a pouty frown.  It was making Curt really horny, despite how much of Arthur’s face was still covered with hideous bruises.

            Curt finally put an end to the battle by giving Arthur another kiss.  Somehow, that one took where the first had failed, and they kept kissing until Arthur’s lip started hurting again.

            By that point, Mandy had come back into the room, and she looked a bit upset, so Jack proposed that it was surely time that they were all given a proper tour of his facilities.  The prospect of being given a tour of the headquarters of a line of high fashion clothing (even one run by Jack) seemed about on par with having teeth pulled, but Arthur sounded interested, so Curt forced himself to go along with it.

            The tour was followed by a ridiculously fancy three-course meal (Curt had never really cared that much for French food) that went on far too long, and led into a very lengthy after-dinner conversation about absolutely fucking nothing.  But then (finally!) they were able to retire for the night.

            In between passionate (but relatively shallow) kisses, Curt and Arthur helped each other out of the clothes Jack had given them.  Arthur’s torso was still covered with horrible bruises that looked very painful.  But he’d been provided with a silk thong to wear under his pants, and that sight was enough to make Curt’s cock stand at attention…even more than it already had been.

            Arthur broke out of their kisses when Curt slipped his finger in between his ass cheeks and gently started stroking his hole.

            “What’s wrong?” Curt asked.  “Your lip still hurting?”

            “A little, but…”  Arthur shook his head.  “I don’t think my ribs are recovered enough.  I’m sorry.”  He smiled weakly.  “I could give you a blo—no, that’s not—uh—a hand job.”

            Curt managed not to sigh.  “Better idea,” he suggested.  “C’mon, let’s get in bed.”

            Looking a little perplexed, Arthur let Curt lead him over to the bed.  They both laid down, facing each other, and Curt moved up nice and close before starting to kiss him.  Their cocks were already rubbing against each other, electrifying their bodies with pleasure.  Curt reached down with one hand to start jerking them both off at once.  After a moment or two of pleasant moaning, Arthur’s hand joined his, and soon they were both working their unified erections and crying each others’ names in ecstasy.

            Afterwards, they fell asleep cuddled up together.  (Only to wake up rather sticky the next morning, forcing another shower…)

            Curt was feeling much more confident as they went down to breakfast together.  That had been close enough to count; they were definitely a ‘couple’ now.  So he was completely justified getting jealous of anyone else getting too close!

            They hadn’t been at breakfast long before one of those omnipresent muscular men (was _that_ what Jack’s type was?) came into the room, carrying a telephone on a silver tray, like he was from a scene in an old movie.  “Telephone for you, monsieur,” he said, holding the telephone towards Arthur.

            Arthur looked perplexed, but accepted the phone, lifting it to his ear.  “Hello?”  He listened for a moment, then broke out into a sad-yet-happy smile.  “Mum!”

            Jack suggested that they should step out of the room and give the boy some privacy.  Since it was only his mother on the line, Curt decided to go along with that.  But he stayed close enough that he could watch Arthur’s face as he talked.  He looked pleased enough, but he only looked truly _happy_ when his eyes strayed over to Curt’s face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Tommy's speech, his line about "at what point I should have said ‘no’ and walked away." is...not exactly a quote, but sort of an adaptation, I guess you'd call it, of a line from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". The original line, as near as I can recall, is "There must have been a point at which we could have said 'no' and walked away, and no one would have thought the worse of us for it." It's a very poignant line (and beautifully delivered by Tim Roth in the movie version) that really sticks with me, and i found myself borrowing the phrasing a bit without actually meaning to.
> 
> So, yeah, just wanted to give credit there.


End file.
